Poverty trends in India: A study with reference to SDGs

Sustainable development is the development to meet our present needs without compromising the needs of future generation. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), formed by United Nations in 2015, lay out a uniquely ambitious and comprehensive agenda for global development by 2030. This is a collection of 17 global goals aimed at improving the planet and quality of human life around the world. National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog is the nodal institution for achieving SDGs in India. For achieving SDGs it is essential to remove poverty, hunger, all types of inequalities, to provide education, to promote peace and harmony, cooperation etc. The estimation and incidence of poverty in India is a matter of key concern since independence for policy analysts and academic researchers both because of its score and intensity. On the other hand, increasing population and changing consumption patterns is raising demand for food in India. With the given stable agricultural productivity, the supply of food has failed to meet the ever rising demand. As a result of which problem of food shortage has been facing by India. National poverty line estimates indicates that there has been a decrease in poverty incidence from 59.9 percent in 1973-74 to 36 percent in 1993-94 to 27.5 percent in 2004-05, though poverty numbers remains high. This is due to the lack of continuous monitoring, unawareness among people, defective planning and coordination among various employment generation and poverty alleviation programmes, leakages of funds etc. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to analyse the trends in poverty in India with reference to SDGs. Further, the paper advocates poverty reduction a fundamental goal to attain SDGs.