Does poverty sound enough??

Poverty is an important dimension of human well being and vulnerability. Poverty can be defined with various indicators with the subject of absolute or relative, subjective or objective however the central idea measuring poverty is to provide a quick overview to the level of income and other acceptable living standard measures of economic growth. Poverty is subjected to the human rights as the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) on its article 25 recognizes "the right to standard of living adequate for health and well being of himself and his family including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control''. Poverty also affects the rights such as the right to work (art. 23 UDHR), the right to education (art. 26 UDHR) and cultural rights (art. 27 UDHR).
There have been different approaches and measures to define and measure poverty and the population underlined. Internationally, for instance, poverty lines are developed by taking average of poverty lines used in group of low income developing countries (Ravallion and Chen 1997). Currently one of the regular inspectors of poverty lines across the world 'World Bank' uses the lines of 1.25 USD and 2.5 USD as per capita daily income in purchasing power parity international dollars(i).


In context of Nepal poverty are measured in term of a person or household according to the sources of data realized, with the basis assumption on the daily consumption need of 2,124 calories for an average person with the variations by individuals, geographic and occupational characteristics. This need for food, together with allowances for other non food needs, translated to NPR 4,404 per year in 1995/96. Appropriate cost of living adjustments are made to determine poverty line for any other year. With these adjustments, for example, the poverty lines were determined to be NPR 7,696 for 2003/04 and NPR 9,000 for 2008(ii).

With the discussion above this article deals with the comparative analysis of the indicator and measurement of the current poverty status in context of Nepal. In the line of monetary measurement in differential status of living, poverty status alone can't be subsequent indicators for the measurement of exact influential factors for poverty. This is to be implied that the other dimensions and indicators has to be taken into consideration for the poverty measures. It is the fact that the current indicators of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger with its following targets and indicators fully imply with money indicators.

For instance, if we take the indicator percentage of population living below $1 purchasing power parity per day it is an absolute monetary measure and others follow the same expect indicators 1.2 and 1.5 (which deal with poverty gap ratio and employment to population ratio respectively considered for the measurement in terms of other monetary indicators). These analysis neglects the other impactful measures of standard of living in relevancy to UDHR like sanitation, cooking food, water accessibility and adequacy, asset ownerships, etc. The other research and the studies focusing these particular areas should be incorporated to measure poverty line up in regard to the UDHR and other basic human rights can be enjoyed according to the law of the land.


Data observed furthermore in these contexts like percentage of income poor ($ 1.25 per day) is 55.1% and relatively percentage of income poor ($2.00 per day) is 77.6 % and percentage of poor (national poverty line) is 30.9% ( World Development Indicators 2011, World Bank). These are deprived from the same indicators discussed above however the indicators like child mortality (being 30% MoHP, 2011), nutrition status (being 40%, UNICEF 2010), access of electricity (being 45 % approx. UNDP 2010) are neglected in the computation. These indicators serve as the reporting instinct for the overall demographic study with one simple data outcome. Nonetheless, the author is not suggesting incorporating all the indicator of human well beings however with the ratification of documents like UDHR, UN Global Compact, Convention on Right of Child (CRC) and all other legal instruments should direct the measure of the poverty line. Following the same article of UDHR (art. 25), the basic compliances like water, sanitation, electricity, house, assets, employment, social security, income level, education, economic freedom and the like are needed to be undertaken in computation of poverty index according to the weight-age of their essentialities in daily life of a human being. The persecution of the resources and other essential indicators thus being made in the computation of poverty index in the developing countries either by World Bank or the national governments with the help of the corresponding UN systems should be altered with relevant methodologies.




1. World Bank, 2011, Washington D.C.
2. Central Bureau of Statistics 2005, National Planning commission 2010.