Discuss the causes and consequences of poverty.

Causes

• Colonial deindustrialisation, a drain of wealth, and unequal land settlements left a large mass of land-poor peasants and artisans, which Independence inherited.
• Low farm productivity, tiny holdings, monsoon risk, and still-incomplete land reform in many states keep rural poverty sticky, including in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bundelkhand.
• Informal jobs without security, underemployment, and a slow shift of labour into well-paid manufacturing are urban and rural labour-market causes together.
• Caste exclusion, gender wage gaps, disability, and Adivasi displacement from forest and mine projects are social causes that income averages hide.
• Weak public health and schooling, high out-of-pocket medical cost, and inflation of food and fuel push households below the line after one shock.
• NITI Aayog’s National MPI (health, education, living standards) shows that poverty is multidimensional; Tendulkar and Rangarajan lines measured consumption, not only that wider deprivation.

Consequences

• Undernutrition, stunting, anaemia, and child labour reproduce poverty across generations and cut the demographic dividend.
• Distress migration, slum housing, and open defecation residues (despite Swachh Bharat) degrade urban commons and women’s safety.
• Political clientelism, low bargaining power, and sometimes crime or extremist recruitment grow where the poor cannot wait for markets.
• Environmental stress—over-extraction of groundwater, fuelwood, and floodplain settlement—is both a cause and a consequence of poor households’ survival strategies.
• For the state, poverty raises the fiscal load of food, work, and housing transfers, yet those transfers are also how a republic repairs capability.

Measures that speak to both sides

• MGNREGA (2005) addresses rural joblessness; NFSA (2013) and later free-grain cycles address hunger; PMAY, Ayushman Bharat, and JJM address dwelling, health shock, and water.
• SDG 1 and the MPI dashboard push districts to cut deprivation, not only to raise GDP.
• Consequences shrink only if causes—land, skill, caste, and care—are attacked together; cash or grain alone treats the symptom.