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Interface Between Education and Poverty in India: Eluding Goals and Search for New Perspectives?

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Poverty, Chronic Poverty and Poverty Dynamics

Abstract

Education is an important dimension of development and an indicator of human development and well-being. It is also an important vehicle for attaining higher and sustained economic growth, which may in turn help expand economic opportunities and enhance returns to work and workers, especially among those with higher education and technical skills. In addition, education provides a direct premium in terms of higher earnings at least among a subset of workers at any given level of economic growth.

There is hardly any ‘well educated literate population that is poor, (and) there is no illiterate population that is other than poor’ (Galbraith 1994).

Education Poverty and Income Poverty are closely related and mutually reinforcing. Hence, it is difficult to fix the genesis and direction of causality. It is therefore imperative that the vicious cycle be first broken by redressing education poverty since that has intrinsic value for enhancing the quality of human life beyond income and economic well-being.

The question is how to attain educational security that also ensures the intrinsic value of education, which is an important dimension of amelioration of poverty.

With necessary permissions the paper draws on Shah et al. (2011) CPRC-IIPA Working Paper 46. The authors would like to thank Dr. Shiddalingaswami for his contribution to an earlier version of this paper.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The government’s poverty reduction programmes directly address income poverty. These include self-employment programmes such as the Swarnajayanti Gram Swarojgar Yojana for the rural poor, wage employment programmes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme , social security programmes like the National Old Age Pension Scheme, area development programmes such as the Drought Prone Area Programme and other programmes such as the Indira Awaas Yojana, a housing scheme for the poor.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Development Alternatives, Ahmedabad, India

    Amita Shah

  2. Independent Consultant, Education for Sustainable Development, New Delhi, India

    Kiran Banga Chhokar

  3. Indian Institute of Public Administration, New Delhi, India

    Sanjay Pratap

  4. Gujarat Institute of Development Research (GIDR), Ahmedabad, India

    Itishree Pattnaik

Authors
  1. Amita Shah
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  2. Kiran Banga Chhokar
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  3. Sanjay Pratap
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  4. Itishree Pattnaik
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Correspondence to Amita Shah .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Indian Institute of Public Administration, New Delhi, India

    Aasha Kapur Mehta

  2. Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India

    Shashanka Bhide

  3. Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India

    Anand Kumar

  4. Center for Development Alternatives, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India

    Amita Shah

Appendix

Appendix

Table 12 Education: Important laws, policies, commissions, constitutional provisions and programmes
Full size table
Table 13 State-wise poverty ratio, literacy rate and per capita net state domestic product
Full size table

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Shah, A., Chhokar, K.B., Pratap, S., Pattnaik, I. (2018). Interface Between Education and Poverty in India: Eluding Goals and Search for New Perspectives?. In: Mehta, A., Bhide, S., Kumar, A., Shah, A. (eds) Poverty, Chronic Poverty and Poverty Dynamics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0677-8_8

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