Poverty is as misunderstood as any subject can be. At one level, it could mean no food, no clothes, bad health, and recognized inadequacy of shelters, amenities, and services. But at another level, it becomes so elusive and slippery that it slides through the slick fingers of all the manipulators of figures and wielders of statistics. In the words of Nelson Mandela, “Abject poverty is demeaning, it is an insult on the dignity of those who suffer it. In the end it demeans us all.”

Eradication of poverty is an ethical, social, political and economic imperative of mankind. The World Development Report 2000/2001 mentioned that the voices of poor people bear eloquent testimony to the meaning of poverty. The report is based on the Voices of the Poor study that captured realities faced by more than 60,000 poor people living in 60 countries. The silhouette of poverty depicted in the report appears thus: “To be poor is to be hungry, to lack shelter and clothes, to be sick and not cared for, to be illiterate and not schooled. But for the poor people, living in poverty is more than this. Poor people are particularly vulnerable to adverse events outside their control. They are often treated badly by the institutions of state and society and excluded from voice and power in those institutions.”

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The Nobel prize-winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen articulated the “Capability Approach” to shape the evaluation of poverty and well-being. All these forms of deprivations mentioned herein restrict what Sen calls the “capabilities that a person has, that is, the substantive freedoms he or she enjoys to lead the kind of life he or she values”. In 1998, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Sen the Nobel Prize for Economics” for having restored an ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economic problems.” Prof. Sen had delved beyond mathematical theory and juxtaposed economics with an innovative social vision that was more real and more human. Years of hard work had helped him bring to light many facets of poverty.

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According to Sen, as human beings are diverse, we cannot draw a poverty line (PL) and then apply it across the board to everyone in the same way without taking into account personal characteristics and circumstances. There are geographical, biological and social factors that impact upon the income of individuals. Moreover, the poor are generally deprived of several elements, such as education, access to lands, health and longevity, justice, family and community support, credit and other productive assets and social and economic........

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