In India, it is the poorest of the poor who are not able to escape the circle of poverty. According to a report released by the International Food Policy Institute (IFPRI), it is the ‘ultra poor’ that are being left behind. Despite the plethora of welfare policies, the poorest are proving hardest to uplift. While this may seem along expected lines, South East Asia and even Bangladesh has shown that it is possible to lift all categories of poor at the same time.

The report, called The World’s Most Deprived, authored by five economists at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) based in Washington DC, finds that on the whole India has done well — it has reduced its poverty percentage points from 44.3 per cent in 1990 to 34.3 per cent in 2004.

They have divided the world’s poor into three groups, working on the premise that the severity of poverty is not the same for people at the lowest rung of a dollar a day: subjacent poor ($0.75-1 per day), median poor ($0.5- 0.75) and ultra poor (less than $0.50).

In India, those who live under 50 cents a day (roughly Rs 20 a day), are 17.5 million. Their numbers did fall from 34 million in 1990 to 17.5 million now. But these falling figures do not tell the whole story.

The economists put forward a scenario: what would have happened if everyone’s income went up by the same amount with the underlying income distribution remaining the same. The results showed that the ultra poor performed worse than the other two categories of poor. “They are the hardest hit,” said Akhter Ahmed, lead author and senior researcher at IFPRI.

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