Poverty is a situation where a section of the society, having no fault of their own, is denied of even basic necessities of life. There is no one single definition of poverty and every definition can be said to be arbitrary. However, the most common measure of poverty is based on income – a person is poor if his income level falls below some minimum level, usually called the “poverty line”. Each country uses lines appropriate to its level of development and societal norms and values. There are three perspectives of poverty – Income perspective, Basic needs perspective and Capability perspective. The definition of poverty is debatable as it is a relative term and the indicators vary according to the context – rural, urban, tribal and coastal. Mostly the poverty definition and indicators arrived at by the policy makers from their perspective.
There are vulnerable communities excluded from the poverty targeting of the government due to methodology errors and political influence. Over a period of about six to seven decades – the understanding of poverty has been changed from only income basis to capability basis and multi dimensional considering the health, education, basic amenities, gender inequality, and political participation, vulnerability to shocks, child malnutrition and economic participation. The multidimensional understanding of poverty is an inclusive one which is very relevant to the present day. The resilience of the poor households and their well being with increased income and asset base contributes for poverty graduation into out of poverty. The resilience of the poor households only would sustain the family economic condition and safety net in preventing them falling back into poverty.
The poverty estimates are being made by the measures – Head Count Ratio, Squared poverty ratio, Human Development Index, well being ranking with community participation. In the poverty assessment and graduation measure process, the participation of the community is, generally, not significant. A few NGOs involved in implementing development and poverty reduction programmes, unscientifically, but with systematic community process, try to define poverty and follow poverty graduation process to declare families out of poverty. DHAN Foundation’s mandate is to reduce and eradicate poverty by building sustainable people institutions around any development theme relevant to the context and global arena.
DHAN Foundation works with the mission of “Building people and institutions for development innovations and scaling-up to enable the poor communities for poverty reduction and self reliance”. It works in a highly decentralized manner in keeping with the diversity of themes, contexts, technology etc with about 1.6 million poor families in 14 states in four contexts-rural, urban, tribal and coastal villages. Its two thematic programmes - Kalanjiam Community Banking and Vayalagam Tankfed Agriculture Development are the scaled up ones working for poverty reduction through promotion of people institutions – SHG – Federations for women and marginalized farmers.
The rainfed farming development programme and coastal conservation and livelihoods development programmes of DHAN Foundation are working for addressing the farming risks and vulnerability through technological interventions and fishers and coastal farmers who experience frequent natural disasters. DHAN Foundation is continuously on the lookout for new innovations in development, which can impact the lives of the poor in a sustainable manner. These initiatives provide new opportunities and challenges. Tata-Dhan Academy, Information Technology for the Poor, Working with Panchayats, and Tourism for Development are the other programmes addressing poverty. The newly emerging theme includes Climate Change Adaptation, Youth & Development and Migration & Development.