Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest man of the twentieth century, often talked about poverty. For the prophet of non-violence, poverty was the worst form of violence. Yet, despite paying lip service to his ideals, the United Nations (UN) and its agencies have been unable to eradicate poverty in the seventy-nine years of their existence. The first of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted unanimously by United Nations Member States in 2015 reads: End poverty in all its forms everywhere.

Paradoxically, globally, extreme poverty has barely fallen since 2015, with 70 crore people, that is around 9 per cent of the world’s population, living in extreme poverty, and 280 crore living in poverty, even today. Poverty reduction gained momentum in 1995, after 186 countries signed the Copenhagen Declaration and Program for Action at the World Summit for Social Development. Heads of State and Government, present at the Summit, reached a consensus to place people, not the economy, at the centre of the concerns for sustainable development.

Participants pledged to eradicate poverty, promote full and productive employment, and foster social integration, to achieve a stable, safe and just society. Consequently, rich countries loosened their purse strings, liberally giving out cheap loans, debt relief and grants to poorer countries, and by 2005 the world’s poorest 72 countries, received funds equivalent to 40 per cent of their budgets, which has, unfortunately, come down to 12 per cent now. Even China’s ‘debt trap’ loans seem to be drying up; from US$ 30 billion in 2012, they were down to US$ 4 billion in 2021. From 1990 to 2014, the world made remarkable progress in reducing extreme poverty, with over one billion people moving out of poverty. The global poverty rate decreased annually, by an average of 1.1 per cent, coming down from 37.8 per cent in 1990 to 11.2 percent in 2014.

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Unprecedented economic growth was the main reason for the record poverty reduction during 2000-2014; GDP of poor countries grew by an average 3.7 per cent per year. However, after 2014, factors responsible for rapid growth, viz. free trade, lack of global conflicts and intelligent transfer of cuttingedge technology, slowly lost their impetus, due to escalating global tensions ~ primarily between China and the US. Also, leaders like George Bush, who thought that the West had a moral........

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