In his work Poverty and Famines Amartya Sen states that the fundamental step for grasping the concept of poverty is to decide who should be the focus and what should be the determining factor in estimating poverty is a crucial step that must be determined.
The two primary standards of determination for the same thing, ie “consumption standards” and the “poverty line,” therefore, determine whether a person should be considered poor who is below the prescribed consumption standard or whose income is below the poverty line. In addition, an upheaval of the accumulation of this poverty follows.
In the traditional setup, however, this takes place simply by counting the number of the poor and then saying this as the proportion of the population of the poor to the entire population of the given town.
However, as Sen reiterates, this measure has two severe disadvantages: First, it does not account for the extent of the shortfall in poor people’s earnings from the poverty line ie if the incomes of all poor people are reduced without changing their incomes without hurting them, the head-count measure will remain totally unaffected.
Second, the metric does not take into account the distribution of income among the poor, which would not alter the transfer of income from a relatively weak person to a relatively richer person. Thus both of these shortcomings make this metric as a true indicator of poverty fundamentally unsuitable and call into question the inherent concept of poverty itself.
Professor Sen stresses that certain conversations lead to the view that poverty in the country is not just a form of misery for the poor but also a relatively luxurious nation as a whole. One argument Sen highlights is the combination of disadvantages between a person's financial deprivation and his ability to make this income functional. An example of this is a disabled person whose income has decreased, and he would also need more cash to perform the same functions as a capable person. So he argued that actual poverty lies in capacity deprivation rather than income reductions.
Following his first worry regarding the norm for poverty reduction and aggregation, Sen focuses his attention on the general definition of poverty. He begins by exploring the biological approach. Here he mentions Rowntree, who in his study defined primary poverty in relation to households whose total income was inadequate to meet minimum physical efficiency requirements.
The unspeakable fact of life is that hunger is the most revelatory feature of poverty. However, as Sen pointed out, this poor method has a number of intrinsic shortcomings in its application because there are substantial variations in physical characteristics, climatic circumstances, and working patterns throughout different parts of the world.
For instance, the Americans and Europeans grew in stature as their diets have improved over time, which makes it difficult to draw a line somewhere because it is somewhat difficult to determine the “minimum nutritional need,” since there is an inherently arbitrary nature between different groups and regions.
Second, he identifies the challenge of translating the minimal nutritional requirements into minimum food requirements because it mostly depends on customer choice. While it is easy to tackle the “minimum nutritional need” problem, which is not a very costly basket of fundamental dietary requirements, this is seldom the food habits of the people.
The third crucial element underlined by Sen is that it is not straightforward to identify the basic requirements for non-food goods. The problem can now generally be addressed by assuming that a specific proportion of total income is spent on food, and therefore the minimum costs for food may be used to derive minimum revenue requirements, but the proportion of food expenditure here again varies with the variation of relative prices and the availability of goods and services.
In conclusion, Sen specifically stressed that malnutrition, as mentioned, captures only one part of the idea of poverty, but it is an essential aspect and should play a prominent role in defining the concept of poverty. Sen has highlighted poverty as a capacity deprivation in his book Development as Freedom in emphasizing poverty theory.
He considers poverty as the lack of essential skills rather than simply taking into account the economic component, which is a standard assessment of whether or not a person is poor.
Forerunners of this strategy to poverty-reduction argued that capacity deprivation is an inherently important method to poverty reduction rather than the submissive poverty line approach. However, these approaches cannot be described as entirely separate, as there is a relationship between low incomes and low capacity, however variable, in regard to various communities, families, or people. The relationship between income and capacity would also be substantially affected by the age, gender, and social roles of the person, the location where he lives, and so forth.
In addition, disadvantages are also combined between income deprivation and the key feature of turning income into functions, ie a person with disabilities who is negatively affected by competition with the person in a position to make as much income as he or she is earning.
Furthermore, the income approach to poverty cannot fully address the uneven income divide within the family. There is an inherent gender preference in the distribution of resources which results in female members being neglected. This deprivation can be checked by considering the issue of deprivation capacity ie death rates, sickness, undernourishment, medical neglect, etc which is not detected in the analysis of incomes.
With regard to relative financial deprivation, this leads to absolute deprivation of capacity. This indicates that capacity deprivation is more intensive in a substantial sense than the criterion for the poverty line because it mainly transfers people's focus from the means to the purposes that the people have a cause to pursue and the flexibility to meet these ends accordingly.
Income and capability poverty
One of Sen’s key and crucial works with Jean Dreze focuses on the relationship between income poverty and capacity poverty. Although these perspectives are separate, they must be related at some point since income and capacities go hand in hand.
A person’s money enhances his capacity in general and vice versa. Not only do essential elements such as education and health immediately improve the quality of life and ability, but they also improve a person's ability to earn more and be income-free.
While economic reforms have opened up the economy where India is concerned, new openings are not independent of social backwardness. Suppose the social set-up had supported the Indian economy’s economic prospects. In that case, the economic opportunities might have been notably expanded by the adequate support structure of high literacy, basic learning, health care in general, etc.
However, it’s worth noting that there is one state in India, Kerala, which tends to have faster reductions in income poverty despite its somewhat mediocre economic performance. In comparison, while countries like Punjab depended on economic growth to reduce income poverty, Kerala relied on expanded fundamental education, health care levels, and a fair allocation of land to reduce income poverty.
Here, again, it is crucial to bear in mind that poverty reduction alone cannot be the goal of our poverty alleviation policy. The improvement of human skills should also be linked to the expansion of productivity and profitability. There is an essential indirect connection by which the enhancement of capabilities directly or indirectly serves to better human lives.
Unemployment and capability approach
The loss of income caused by unemployment can, to a large extent, be compensated by income support, where the loss of income was the only thing involved in unemployment. However, unemployment has a more terrible impact on one's life than mere loss of income, including emotional harm, job loss, and self-confidence. Enhancement of distress and morbidity, etc, the ability technique manages to investigate this key consideration more closely in the image.
Poverty and deprivation with respect to Bangladesh:
Although Bangladesh may be a bit better on average than the poorest performers in terms of life expectancy and other characteristics, it is essential to consider that there are huge areas where conditions are even worse than the worst-performing countries in Bangladesh. Although the Bangladeshi GDP and per capita income have increased at a higher rate over the previous ten years, the majority in Bangladesh is at the lowest per capita income level, so we are not given a crystal clear picture of their character and substance. Instead, if we assess poverty in terms of the deprivation of fundamental capacity, we get a far better picture of life in the main part of the population.
There are three main elements of deprivation of basic capacities that Prof Sen focuses on distinguishing India and sub-Saharan Africa, in my thought its equivalents on the nature of deprivation similar to Bangladesh. Premature mortality, undernourishment, and analphabetism are included.
The proposed definition of poverty as an absence of capacity includes both absolute and relative conceptions of poverty. Sen does not deny the importance of the social processes that define the living standards shared by people in a particular community. Then we can say that the function that needs to be seen as part of a certain community varies from company to society, as Townsend and his colleagues have diagnosed.
But the concept of poverty is an absolute core, namely that poor people do not have the same range of possibilities as those who are not poor. Poverty might therefore be understood as this shortfall in terms of people’s basic ability to live their own lives.
Another feature that can be stressed is that this definition of poverty enables us to examine the functioning that each community considers worthy of trouble by bringing it forward into the public thinking process. It is not the researchers’ responsibility for Sen to identify which capacities are of universal value and which are not. This is why, instead of offering a closed list of skills, he promotes the necessity of democracy, understood as the “government by debate,” as the place where people may make the gaps of capacity that call for governmental action a priority.
On the other hand, Sen argues that researchers can develop capacity lists for specific research aims, hence seeking to define the fundamental capacities needed to assess poverty in a specific community or a larger population. So, from the above discussion, it can be assumed and observed that poverty is a local concept, not a universal one.
Kalyan Chakroborty is an OELP alumnus of the University of Oxford under DLA Piper GSP.
