Poverty in Rural Nepal: A Case Study of Manpur Vdc, Dang District in Nepal

Abstract

Nepal is a least developed country in the world. It has a rural economy based on agriculture and characterised by scarce and underdeveloped resources increasing inequality, illiteracy under development and increasing poverty. Poverty is the cause of conflicts, caste, ethnicity and gender discrimination.The present study has focused the poverty in Rural Nepal of Manpur VDC, Dang district. It also explains the absolute, relative and totalpoverty, identify theextent of poverty and incident of poverty in the study area. The study has been conducted in 3 ward of the Manpur VDC. There spondents were selected 70 household from ward 1, 2 and 3 on the basis of purposive sampling. In the study area the people of the household have the income Rs.15.8 per capita per day this considered as absolute poverty which was calculated from local prices of the cereal, pulse and other non-food item according to NPC and for the relative poverty is the people of the household who have income below Rs. 21 is considered as relative poverty calculated from wolf point. In the sample population male are 49.18 percent and female are 50.82 percent. In caste wise distribution of the households,Brahmin are 16.58 percent, Chhetri 17.89 percent, Tharu 33.16 percent,Dalit 15.79 percent, other 16.58 percent shown. The educated status of the sampled population 37.37 percent are illiterate and 62.63 percent are literate and in them only 23.95 percent population are upto 10 class. Theextent of poverty shows the value of Gini-coefficient of sampled household is0.31. The value of Gini-coefficent of Brahmin is0.19, Tharu is 0.2, Dalit(Kami, Damai, Sarki) is 0.21 and the value of women is 0.23. Thus to find out the value of area of concentration or extent of inequality, from the sampled household total poor are 58.57 percent, and non poor 41.43percent. In the study area the majority of economically active population are engaged in agriculture sector, but they have low productivity, lack of agriculture credit, fertilizers and irrigation, small size of land holding,backward technology, lack of market facilities and minimum basic infrastructure etc. which make them poor. The problem of poverty is different from country and even from region to region. The provision of irrigation should be spread. Improved agriculture technology, live stock development, vegetable cultivation poultry farming, compulsory and free education should be instituted for children.Most labour forced engaged in agricultural sector should be transformed toother more productive sectors and agro based industry should be established.