Poverty

Poverty is the state of one who lacks a usual or socially

acceptable amount of money or material possession.It is aid to
exist when some people lack the means to satisfy basic needs.In
context,identification of poor people first requires a
determination of what constitutes the basic needs.They may be
defined as narrowly as ”those necessary for their survival” or
as broadly as “those reflecting the prevailing standard of living
in the community.” The first criteria would cover those people
who are near the borderline of starvation or death from
exposure; the second criteria would extend to the people whose
nutrition, housing, and clothing, though adequate to preserve
life, do not measure up to the ones from the population as a
whole. The problem of definition is further compounded by
noneconomic connotations that the word poverty has acquired.
Poverty has been associated with low levels of education,poor
health or skills,the inability or an unwillingness to work, high
rates of disruptive behaviour, and improvidence. While these
attributes have often been found to exist with poverty, their
inclusion in a definition of poverty would obscure the relation
between them along with the inability to provide for one’s basic
needs. Whatever definition one uses, authorities and laypersons
alike commonly assume that the effects of poverty are harmful to
both society and the individuals.Although poverty is a
phenomena as old as the history of human,the significance of
poverty has changed over time. Under traditional (non-
industrialized) modes of economic production, widespread
poverty has been accepted as inevitable. The total output of
goods and services, even if equally distributed, would still have
been insufficient to give the entire population a comfortable
standard of living by prevailing standards. With the economic
productivity which resulted from industrialization, however, this
ceased to be the case—especially in the world’s most
industrialized countries, where national outputs were sufficient
to raise the entire population to a comfortable level if necessary
redistribution could be arranged without adversely affecting the
output.
Several types of poverty may be distinguished depending on
those factors as time or duration (long- or short-term or
cyclical) and distribution (widespread construction).
Cyclical poverty refers to poverty which may be widespread
throughout a population, but the occurrence is of limited
duration. In non-industrial societies,the inability to provide for
one’s basic needs rests mainly on temporary food shortages
caused by natural phenomena. Prices may rise because of
scarcities of food, which brought widespread,albeit temporary,
misery. In contrast to cyclical poverty, which is temporary,
widespread or “collective” poverty includes a relatively
permanent insufficiency of means to secure all sorts of basic
needs. Both generalized and concentrated collective poverty are
transmitted from generation to generation.
On the other hand, concentrated collective poverty occurs when
the collective poverty described above is suffered by specific
subgroups within a society, or localized in particular
communities or regions that are devoid of industry, good-paying
jobs, and that lack access to fresh and healthy food. Poverty is a
social evil, we can also contribute to control it. For example-one
can simply donate old clothes to poor people,can also sponsor
the education of a poor child or utilize our free time by teaching
poor students.Remember before wasting food, somebody is still
sleeping hungry.