Published Paper Details:

Poverty is generally perceived as lack of income and assets for meeting the minimum needs for a decent living and the same leads to many other forms of deprivations related to human well being, essential for a meaningful life. Poverty deprives one from adequate food and nutrition, proper shelter, education, treatment during illness and similar essential material needs. Apart from material deprivation poverty leads to failure in participating in various social, cultural and economic activities and the poor have very little strength to mitigate the risk to any vulnerability, which affects them materially as well as morally. People living in poverty have lack of capacity to work for their own welfare and very often they have to compromise their dignity. Even after more than 62 years of planning, various poverty alleviation programmes, official estimates shows that around 26.1 percent of total population still lives below the poverty line in India. According to data, 29.8 per cent or 360 million Indians were poor in 2011. While 51% of the country's total workforce is self-employed, only 15.5% are regular wagers or salaried employees and 33.5% casual labourers, according to a survey by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO).