Poverty Analysis of Majhi & Kumal Community for the Rural Development Process: A Case Study of Charambi VDC of Bhojpur District.

Abstract

‘’Poverty and development has inverse relationship’’

Poverty means condition of having insufficient resources or income. In its most extreme form, poverty is a lack of basic human needs, such as adequate and nutritious food, clothing, housing, clean water, and health services whereas development means having basic needs, growth, improvements and positive changes in living standard. Extreme poverty can cause terrible suffering and death, and even modest levels of poverty can prevent people from realizing many of their desires. In other hands, it brings hunger, starvation, illiterate, unhealthy condition, malnutrition, unemployment, i.e. food crisis, lack of shelter, and clothes for basic needs so poverty is the evils of human being. Development means discontinuous changes, authoritarian values and norms changing to modernization process, rationality prevail and region based social norms and values emerge the static society into dynamic and improve human values, new technology changes old production relation, new opportunities of unconventional means of livelihood appears in the society, and basic infrastructures facilitate better utilization of available resources i.e. development refers growth in per-capita income, growth in literacy, health facility, increase in life expectancy rate, and low maternal and child mortality rate. Thus the dynamic mobilization of socio-economic structure of rural society refers to the process of development. Poverty and development are the multi-dimensional phenomenon. It never gives up the human being so from the above explanation we can conclude that lower the poverty level higher the development and vice-versa. Thus it has the inverse relationship with each other and analysis of poverty is the first step of development process for the human beings where in this research I have analyzed the income poverty, status of human poverty and causes of poverty of Majhi and Kumal community. From the data analysis of this study I have found that 89.4 percent of Majhi and 91.12 percent of Kumal are engaged in agriculture occupation rather than their traditional occupation such as boating, fishing, and pottery making. They are totally displaced from their traditional occupation due to the tender policy bringing by the state and local governance in boating and fishing sector which are the misfortune of that community. In the education sector 68.24 percent of Majhi and 66.67 percent of Kumal’s are illiterate where only 2.35 percent of Majhi community have found the SLC holder and all Kumal’s are under SLC. The income sources of that community are foreign employment, daily wages labour, bonded labour wages and income from tobacco as a cash crop. Landholding size per Majhi household is 1.29 ropani and per Kumal household is 1.36 ropani which is very low for their survival in hill area. Thus they are in extreme poverty.