In Class 9 Economics (Chapter: Poverty as a Challenge), after defining poverty and measuring it, the textbook asks a deeper, more uncomfortable question: Within the poor, who suffers the most? These most vulnerable groups are called the 'Poorest of the Poor'.
According to NCERT, poverty must be understood not just as a lack of income, but as deprivation of basic capabilities — a concept developed by Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.
The 'Poorest of the Poor' are not just people who lack money — they are groups who face multiple, compounding layers of disadvantage simultaneously:
1. Women: Even within poor families, women are the last to eat, the first to skip meals, the least likely to receive healthcare, and most likely to be kept out of school. They bear the burden of poverty most severely.
2. Female-headed households: Families where women are the sole earner (due to widowhood, abandonment) have the least access to credit, land rights, and economic opportunities.
3. Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST): Social discrimination, historical exclusion from education and land ownership, and limited access to government services makes these communities disproportionately represented among the very poorest.
4. Landless agricultural laborers: Rural workers who own no land are completely dependent on daily wage work and suffer most during droughts, crop failures, or offseasons.
5. Urban casual workers: Migrant workers in cities doing daily-wage construction, domestic work, and ragpicking, with no job security, no savings, and no social protection.
These groups are the poorest not just due to low income, but because they also lack:
The poverty line is an income threshold below which a person cannot afford the minimum acceptable standard of living. In India, it is estimated based on minimum caloric intake requirements (2400 kcal/day in rural areas, 2100 kcal/day in urban areas).
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