Poverty is not an original state, nor are the poor the victims of their own faults and weaknesses. Nor is it due to shortcomings in personality or morality, or failures in family or upbringing. Poverty is about exclusion, physical and economic insecurity, fear of the future, a constant sense of vulnerability. Poverty is created by societies and governments. Poverty is experienced as individuals, family and communities. Poverty is embedded in complex of policies, interactions and relationships.
- Poverty is self-sustaining. In the modern economy, once a person or group is caught in its trap, it is hard to escape the cycle of poverty. It destroys self-confidence and the capacity to organize collective action and response.
- Economic globalisation, which include the privatisation of state resources and functions, and the introduction of charges even for the most basic needs reinforce the cycle of poverty by cutting off possibilities of social mobility.
- A powerful economic and political class emerges on the back of this poverty, with no interest in social reform, creating further obstacles to equitable distribution of resources. In this way poverty leads to social exclusion.
- Poverty negates the realisation or enjoyment of human rights. The purpose of human rights, a life in dignity, is rendered impossible by poverty. The daily struggles of the poor constantly humiliate them.
- There is no real possibility of poor people enjoying rights, whether civil and political or social, economic and cultural, without resources such as education, physical security, health, employment, property, participation, and due process - all of which poverty negates. In poverty there can be no control over one’s life chances or even everyday life.
- Existence in hovels without the basic amenities of life allows no time or ability for self-reflection, essential for identity, self- realisation, or making moral judgments. Poverty generates habits of subservience and docility that denies the premise of the equality and dignity of all persons.
- Poverty also forces persons into slavery and bondage, and stories of parents selling children into slavery out of desperation are now common place in states like India, Bangladesh, and Nigeria - and many other parts of the world.
- A poor man cannot support his family and tends to draw away from it, burdening the wife with additional responsibilities to sustain the family.
- Poverty creates or reinforces divisions within the family, in which the male members get priority over scarce family resources. In this way poverty subverts decent and fulfilling family life.
- Family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society which is entitled to protection by society and the state.
- Poverty not only deprives and demeans the poor but also affects the affluent and society. It sharpens inequalities and leads to crime, law and order, as the poor resort to various forms of self-help to eke out a living, including thefts and robberies. Security becomes an obsession for the middle classes, turning their suburbs into fortresses. The slums that grow out of poverty breed diseases and environmental degradation that can scarcely be contained within the confines of the slums.
- In the modern age poverty poses a major threat to social consensus and political stability. Poverty erodes the moral fibre and the moral cohesion of a society. It destroys the self-confidence of the people caught in the cycle of poverty, and leads to the waste of resources.
- Ideology is used to justify the limits on the role of the state in providing social welfare. Disparities of opportunities and incomes have increased in recent years. The poor can make themselves heard only by irregular demonstrations, to limited effect.
- We need fundamental social and economic reforms to ensure all its residents a decent life in dignity which is so eminently within reach, based on its wealth and resources.
