All about India

1. Decreasing job opportunities
Due to globalization, new industries and factories are set up in urban India, resulting in increased competition between rural and urban industries. When rural industries are unable to compete with them in terms of pricing and quality, they are shut down and the workers then become unemployed. As the number of industries shut down overpower the number of jobs available, the people are then left to earn a living through odd-jobs. Furthermore, the number of long term employment contracts are declining throughout rural India. This aggravates the unemployment issue, causing an increase in poverty rates in rural India.

2. Lack of education
In India, many people lack access and are unable to afford good quality education. However, this is much worse in rural areas, where there are little good quality educational institutes and also low affordability of education. Hence, these people tend to lack important skills that are needed for them to be able to venture out into society to look for higher paying jobs to better their socio-economic conditions. As a result, people from rural areas are often left to continue with the agricultural activities, making them prone to falling below the poverty line due to the low-wage nature of agricultural jobs and unpredictable environmental conditions. From this, we see that the issue of the lack of affordable and good quality education is of high importance. Quoting the UNICEF Executive Director Mr. Carol Bellamy, “No country has ever emerged from poverty without giving priority to education.”(Indian Currents, 2004). Therefore, it can be said that if the issue of poverty is not resolved, poverty will continue to remain dominant in the Indian society.

3. Lack of access to healthcare
Due to the lack of access to healthcare in rural India, the sick are unable to rid their illnesses to seek job opportunities to earn a living. For those who have access to healthcare, much of their income is spent on healthcare costs, resulting in the lack of funds to either continue with their business or sustain their families. To learn more about the lack of access to healthcare in India, click here.

4. Unfavourable and unpredictable climatic conditions
Some rural areas of India are flood-prone, which affects many living in rural areas as most of them are dependent on agriculture as their livelihood. Hence, when the flooding season arrives, it leaves the people with no means to support themselves as agricultural activities cannot be carried out. Sometimes, there is also a lack of timely rain during the cultivating season, resulting in droughts and dry-spells that are detrimental to agriculture. For example, recent Cyclone Phailin has caused an extreme damage in the Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, which led to an onion price rise (Kaur, 2013). These unfavourable and unpredictable climatic conditions cause people living in rural areas to lack a stable and sufficient income, leading to poverty in the long run. To learn more about how drought affects poverty in India, click here. To find out more about how flooding affect poverty in India, click here.

5. Underdeveloped agriculture systems
While India is heavily dependent on agriculture, the agricultural facilities are underdeveloped and are unable to sustain the growing population. In India, agriculture is mostly done by people living in rural areas where they have more access to land for farming. However, rural areas face the issue of the lack of transport facilities and irrigation facilities, resulting in inefficient trade and exchange of goods needed for agriculture, as well as bad physical conditions that will deter good harvests. Also, agriculture in India is highly manipulated by the unstable and unfavourable climatic conditions that India faces. Hence, agriculture provides an unstable livelihood for people, which makes them vulnerable and susceptible to poverty.