Poverty and Human Development in Rural Bihar
By
Anup K Karan
Fellow, Institute for Human Development
Measuring poverty is a challenging and complicated task because poverty itself is complex and multidimensional. Although conventional income and consumption based measures are essential for poverty monitoring, they seriously fail to capture critical aspects of well-being. Well-being, however, is more difficult to define as it encompasses a multitude of dimensions, both economic and non-economic. While the estimations of asset holding, income, and consumption is a direct quantitative measure of poverty, the level of human development captured through education and availability of health facilities and basic amenities is supposed to be an indicator of overall well-being. Moreover, many dimensions of deprivation experienced by the poor can be best identified by soliciting their own perception and insights. Hence, before going into various dimensions of well being, we will have a look on the perception by the poor themselves about poverty, and ill being.
Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to analyse present status of rural poverty in Bihar and changes therein during the last two decades. The paper is largely based on a comparison of panel data generated through two primary surveys during 1981-83 for the first time and 1999-2001 for the second time from the same 12 villages, spread over six districts, of the state. On the basis of the data collected at two points of time, it is argued in this paper that although there has been marked improvement in the living status of people a large proportion of lower castes and classes population continues to live in abject poverty and are leading a very poor quality of life.
The paper is organised in three sections. Section I is based on qualitative data collected in the 12 villages through participatory rural appraisals (PRA) and presents perception of villagers regarding poverty and changes in the living conditions over time. Section II presents a crude estimation of poverty on the basis of income and expenditure criteria. The third section (Section III) presents a detailed account of pattern of consumption expenditure and food sufficiency to the households. A changing nature of consumption expenditure asset holding position and food availability has also been presented in this section. Section IV deals with other aspects of human development such as education, heath, access to institutions and civic facilities etc. Section V presents conclusion.
On the basis of the data collected from the 12 villages author finds that poverty in Bihar shows a multi dimensional contrasts. One the one hand it is associated with social characteristic, such as caste and class of the households, on the other it is related to human development indicators such as access to educational and health facilities. There is no doubt that over the years food sufficiency has improved in general, there is still a large variations in terms of consumption of food items across different castes and classes of the households. The crude poverty ratio in terms of consumption expenditure is around 46 per cent in rural Bihar, however, there is a large concentration of poor among agricultural labour and lower castes households. Seeing the distribution of poverty ratio across different consumption expenditure groups, it is evident that the inequality in terms of poverty has increased over the years. The asset holding position of the households also leads to same kind of conclusion. More specifically, holding of productive assets among the poorest class, largely comprised of lower classes and caste groups, is abysmally low showing very little scope for reproductive investment among these groups.
Various indicators of human development show improvement over the years. During the last two decades or so the levels of education, health facilities, mobility, mortality, basic amenities etc. have improved. However, these indicators are still at very low level in general and at abysmally low levels in case of lower castes and class households. Among the reasons of the slow progress of these indicators the most important is poor functioning of the government institutions. Poor functioning of government institutions is clearly spelt out particularly in terms of educational and health institution we have seen above that, because of low quality of education and irregularity of teachers in government schools, most of the people prefer to enroll their children in private schools. Likewise poor health related facilities from government run PHC and health sub-centres at village level has compelled the villagers to rely upon private doctors, local RMP, quacks, etc.
Among some of the basic amenities provision of rural drinking water has shown virtual revolution particularly during the last two decades. Now almost the whole population is covered under rural drinking water programmes. However, there is acute problem related to non-functioning of government tube-wells and hand pumps. The poor or even non-maintenance of tube-wells and hand pumps in rural areas is gradually compelling people to depend on open sources of drinking water. Sanitation facilities in villages continue to be abysmally poor and there has been absolutely no change over the years except in case of a few richer households.
The poverty and human development situation in rural Bihar needs more focussed programmes in order to benefit the poorest section of the society. Seeing the high level of inequality of income, consumption expenditure, asset holding position, access to social institutions and basic amenities etc. This is an urgent need to reorient and target many of the government programmes towards the poorest section.