Legal Measures for Poverty Alleviation in India
A Study
Keywords:
Poverty, Poor People, Indigent Persons, Destitute, Human Rights, Constitutional RightsAbstract
Poverty is a state of an individual, a family or a society where people are unable to fulfill even their basic necessities of life. When a substantial segment of a society is deprived of the minimum level of living and continues at a bare subsistence level, that society is said to be plagued with mass poverty. The problem of poverty and unemployment is considered as the biggest challenge to development planning in India. India as a welfare State is committed to the development of its people. The Constitutional responsibility is reflected via legislations and development policies. Various laws have been enacted to reduce poverty- some of them directly deal with it and some of them indirectly such as provisions enshrined under the Constitution of India, 1950, the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, the National Food Security Act, (NFSA) 2013 etc. Several poverty alleviation programmes have also been in place for a long time now. The programmes and schemes have been modified, consolidated, expanded and improved over time. The targeted programmes fall into four broad categories: (i) self-employment programmes, (ii) wage employment programmes, (iii) direct cash transfers to the targeted groups and (iv) public distribution system. Indian judiciary has also intervened and interpreted various facets of poverty in various landmark cases and issued guidelines from time to time for protecting concerns of poor people, implementation of various laws and policies. This paper is an attempt to analyse various laws and governments schemes for poverty alleviation in India. This paper also highlights numerous issues with the laws and governments schemes and put forth feasible suggestion s for the same.
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