Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) are also known as Global Goals, “these

goals were adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015 as a universal call to action

to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by

2030, in this, the member states are committed to prioritizing progress for those who’re

furthest behind. The Sustainable Development Goals are designed to end poverty, hunger,

AIDS, and discrimination against women and girls” 1. There are in total 17 goals and these

goals, to be achieved by all the member states by 2030, but achieving these goals is not easy

because of various problems such as poverty, climate change, gender equality, pandemics,

etc. For me, eradication of poverty is very important because without bringing everyone out

of poverty the country will not be able to develop and become one of the strongest nations.

There have been several attempts by the Indian government to eradicate poverty from India

but could not completely eradicate poverty from India, therefore, to eradicate poverty from

India I propose to take the help of private and public universities to promote education and

implement the ‘universal basic principle’.

According to the World Bank a person who earns less than 1.90 dollars a day, is

living below the poverty line. When I say poverty, I refer to people who do not have “enough

resources to provide the basic necessities of life such as food, clean water, shelter, clothing,

education, and access to health care”2 to themselves and their families. Poverty is not just

limited to lack of enough resources, but it also manifests itself in lack of opportunities for

education, discrimination, and being outcasted from the decision making process. This is

more evident from the statistics which show that children from below the poverty line are less

likely to get the opportunity for education and have very less average life expectancy

compared to children from the above poverty line. The government of India in an effort to

eradicate poverty implemented various schemes to develop urban areas such as the Mahatma
1
https://www.undp.org/sustainable-development-goals.
2
Okalow, Samson. “What is poverty? It’s not as simple as you think.” World Vision Canada, 20 May 2021,
https://www.worldvision.ca/stories/child-sponsorship/what-is-poverty. Accessed 8 July 2021.
Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in 2016 which is the

world’s largest employment scheme, under which 100 days of wage employment is

guaranteed, implemented Public Distribution System (PDS) under which food and other

essential goods were given to poor people at a subsidized rate. Because of such schemes

people from below the poverty line started earning daily wages which resulted in having extra

money with them thus there was the reduction in poverty, “as per UNDP Global

Multidimensional Poverty Index 2020 in 2005-06 over 640 million people across India were

in multidimensional poverty; with the successful implementation of social protection policies,

273 million people moved out of multidimensional poverty over a period of 10 years” 3,

28.7% of households have at least one family member covered under health insurance,

84.44% of the beneficiaries were provided employment in 2019-2020 under the Mahatma

Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 91.38% of the eligible people received

benefits under Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY). “From a critical lens,

certainly, each social protection programme and CSS suffers from an array of difficulties

such as rigidity, non-adaptability to local conditions, late disbursement of funds, reallocation

of funds to unrelated recurring expenditure, and wide-ranging rent-seeking practises” 4 and in

few instances the beneficiaries receive only 50% of the allocated fund because middlemen

take misappropriates the money. The measures taken by the Indian government have surely

lifted people out of poverty, I feel these measures just act as a band-aid on the problem of

poverty rather than solving the problem itself, and therefore it is more likely people will fall

again back into poverty.

3
Das, Kumar and Mohanty, Bijeta. “Poverty eradication in India: Successes and shortcomings of social protection.”
International Growth Centre, 15 Oct 2020, https://www.theigc.org/blog/poverty-eradication-in-india-successes-and-
shortcomings-of-social-protection/. Accessed 8 July 2021.
4
Supra 3.