INCOME-BASED POVERTY MEASUREMENT IN THE MISING COMMUNITY OF ASSAM: A QUANTITATIVE STUDY

Poverty is a complex phenomenon and remains one of the most serious problems facing the world economy today. The World Bank (2000) has defined poverty as the pronounced deprivation of well-being. Traditionally, measurements of poverty were dominated by the income approach. According to critics, poverty is not only about not having a minimum level of income for survival. The well-being of people can be negatively influenced by the lack of various necessities like deprivations related to health, illiteracy, undernourishment, unavailability of adequate electricity, cooking fuel, sanitation, housing, pure drinking water, etc. But despite having limitations, the income approach is the most widely used and continuously followed method of measuring poverty, mainly because of its simplicity and also, partly, due to the availability of data. Therefore, by using primary data and the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) methodology, the present paper mainly tries to calculate the incidence (headcount ratio), depth, and severity of poverty among the Mising population of Assam. The Mising community is a vulnerable tribal community of Assam, facing deprivations in terms of all viable indicators used to define poverty.