Every human being needs a range of basic necessities, such as food, water, clothing, shelter, education, and health care, for his or her daily life. The economic condition of lacking these essential goods and services to meet basic needs of life is called poverty.

While poverty exists everywhere, it is most severe in developing countries, where more than one person in five lives on less than $1 a day – the threshold, which is being used by the World Bank to define extreme poverty. In 2001, over 1 billion people lived in extreme poverty and nearly half the world’s population (2.8 million) lived on less than $2 a day.

In developed countries, poverty results in wandering homeless people and poor suburbs and ghettos. In these cases we talk about relative poverty (in contrast to absolute poverty), which is measured by comparing one group’s situation to the situations of those who are more advantaged.

The causes of poverty vary: lack of education, war, natural disasters, political corruption, mental illness, and disability are among the most common causes.

Eliminating poverty in developing countries is the goal of international development initiatives and the many international organizations working in the field. Strategies on how to eradicate poverty are, however, as numerous as the causes of poverty itself. The World Bank’s anti-poverty strategy, for example, depends heavily on reducing poverty though the promotion of economic growth.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which are part of the Millennium Declaration, signed by the member states of the United Nations at the Millennium Summit in 2000, regard the elimination of extreme poverty as a much more complex task. Empowering women, combating HIV/AIDS and other diseases and ensuring sustainable development are among the goals and are all seen as necessary if extreme poverty is to be alleviated.

P.S.: This post is an attempt to record my feeling of relief... the first day off.

For me, this day stands as a memory...how relieved one feels to walk free...live the life on one's own terms...before slipping into the routine again...We have choices and we have chances..but unfortunately we cannot exercise both of them at the same time...period!

Women normally offer an interesting challenge for men's intellect. Most of the time, everyone of us are stuck at appreciating the beauty rather than transcending beyond it to understand the person...I urge the reader to kindly try answering this question.. how often did you stand at an entrance of a passage-way and were lost in the beauty of it rather than seeking what lies beyond it? It is important to understand the value of both beauty and the brain to better appreciate what is the driving force for attraction. Beauty offers the elegance of a foyer while brains offer the ambiance... This is probably one of the reasons why the following statement makes much sense...

"...The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think... "

For most of the men, women are beautiful indeed. But they grow beyond being mere beauties like the sympathetic characters in a play, to present themselves as an appealing and a memorable personality when they pose a challenge to the men's intellect... The feeling of understanding someone can only be achieved when one transcends the boundary of 'physical appeal' into 'appeal to the senses' i.e. when we see her as an innate challenge offering the intoxicating mix of appeal and intellect... I expect most of the readers might have a different view which might be either complementary or supplementary to that of mine.. comments are highly solicited...

(This is an article written by Prof. M. Balakrishnan, Professor of Computer Science amp; Engineering at IIT Delhi. He has been with IIT Delhi since 1977 except for a three year stint outside India. Currently he is on Sabbatical and working with a startup)

It is estimated that 158 million children aged 5-14 are engaged in child labour worldwide. Millions of children are engaged in hazardous work environments like mines, working with petro-chemicals and pesticides. From Sub-Saharan Africa where around one in three children are engaged in child labour, representing 69 million children to South Asia, where 44 million are engaged in child labour because of poverty.

A study demonstrated the parallels between the historical pattern of the decline in child labor in the United States and situations today in developing countries. It is understood that the greater the extent of poverty in a country, the greater the amount of child labor, the relationship holding within a country over time as well as across countries at a given point in time. Though poverty may be a determinant of child labor, it cannot be examined in the absence of cultural and social factors, such as education, culture, and urbanization. Another Study points that child labor is deeply rooted in poverty and social customs. Thus, one reason for such high labor force participation is that working children are from impoverished families. There are several social and cultural explanations for widespread child labor in developing countries.

The effect of being sold into slave labor has the obvious physical scars from the constant beatings the children receive, their inhumane living conditions, and the practical starvation that the employers impose on them. However, the effects of slavery do not merely affect the physical well-being of the children. They also suffer from emotional scars. In addition to the risks that they face, there are also many negative side effects of exposing children to the excessive demands of adult labor. These side effects not only manifest themselves in the children’s health and growth, but also in their access to education. In fact, it is rare to find children who, over a prolonged period of time, manage to balance their studies with their daily chores. More than half of children laborers have never attended school, and those who have rarely finish the first cycle of elementary school. As researchers have noted, boycotting exports of goods produced by children may actually worsen the welfare and well-being of those children and their families, first by lowering their living standards and second by pushing children into dangerous work endeavors, such as begging and prostitution. This speaks of the need for a sustainable development plan to include the marginalized sections of the society to best tackle the growing numbers of child abuse.

If we can understand the dynamics of poverty, education, and child labor, we may be in a position to create more effective ways of eliminating child labor through education and economic development efforts. The problem of child labour, being inextricably linked with poverty and illiteracy, cannot be solved by legislation alone and a concerted effort to tackle this problem will bring in the desired sustainable growth.