Abstract:   As carly as 1938, the Indian Congress constituted a national Planning Committee headed by Jawaharlal Nehru, which had declared that the social objective should be "to ensure an adequate standard of living for the masses." The concept of poverty is multi dimensional i.e. income poverty and non-income poverty. It covers not only levels of income and consumption, but also health and education etc. The economic reforms in India were initiated in mid 1991 in response to economic crisis and to improve the economic situation. There has been a debate whether the 1991 reforms have adverse effect on poverty and employment. According to Tendulakar (1998), Joshi and Little (1997) in short run there is an adverse efect on poverty. While in medium and log run it would positive. However, according to Ghosh (1995) and Baduri (1998) the economic reforms have adverse effect on the poor in both short and log run. The former Finance Minister Manmohan Singh and P. Chidambaram (2002) stated that the cconomic reforms will help to relieve poverty if our growth rate goes by 8 percent, we will see a marked and very dramatic impact upon the lives of the very poor of this country. So with these views we are trying to examine the trend of poverty in India and the impact of economic reforms on poverty. And lastly to suggest a strategy for to strengthen the poverty alleviation programmes in the next generation reforms period. One has to keep in mind that the observed employment/unemployment and poverty situation is caused by reform related policies as well as long term struchural factor. They are also influenced by exogenous factors like weather and external shocks. Therefore, one has to be careful in analyzing the impact of reforms on employment and poverty.

Keywords:   unemployment, poverty, economic crisis, economic reforms

Publisher:   ILMA UNIVERSITY

Published:   31 May 2005

Issue:   Issue 1 : Volume 1

E-ISSN:   2409-6520

P-ISSN:   2414-8393