Liberating the poor from poverty!

Every conscious mind thinks about alleviating poverty at least once in their
lifetime and tries to figure out the ultimate single solution to it. But when
making an in-depth analysis of the issue, one finds out that its a vicious
cycle. Once fallen into the pits of poverty, many interrelated economic and
social deprivations make the escape almost impossible without any external
assistance. The poor are deprived of their necessities, proper education,
health, credit, insurance, and infrastructure, for example.
Without education, one cannot find good employment opportunities. This
leads to low incomes. Consequently, translating into unavailability of proper
nutrition and health which results in lower productivity. Ultimately leading to
lower income that continues the vicious cycle. Thus, to break this cycle, one
needs external assistance either in the form of subsidies or direct monetary
assistance.
Banerjee and Duflo in their paper, Economic Lives of The Poor, have tried to
encapsulate how lives of the poor (defined by the World Bank as an
individual living under two dollars a day) are different based on factual
evidence from thirteen different countries. According to the paper, the poor
live in the form of large families to decrease fixed costs, consume most of
the available income yet can consume only fifty percent of their daily
required calories.
They hardly have any formal saving, insurance and credit options available
to them and lack assets to use as collateral for credit. They have to migrate
regularly in search of jobs and are hardly able to specialize in a particular job
to earn more and are often involved in part time small businesses and petty
jobs, often at the same time. Their children go to dysfunctional public schools
and the sick go to government hospitals where neither trained staff nor
medicine is available.
The problems highlighted above cannot be solved at the same time, but
policies can be devised that tackle one core issue at a time and can provide
external assistance needed to break this vicious, and currently inevitable,
cycle. For example, making credit available on affordable terms to the poor
may serve as an external factor that catalyzes economic growth. Credit may
be utilized efficiently to start specialized small businesses, provide children
with quality education, ensure provision of proper health care, aid in human
capacity development, invest in assets and make attempts at breaking the
vicious cycle of poverty.
Thus, policy makers should devise efficient policies to make cheap credit
available to the poor. Furthermore, it should be supplemented with improved
infrastructure facilities to provide access to domestic markets and legal
frameworks that ensure the better implementation of laws to guarantee
productive and economic efficiency. By increasing the number of available
opportunities for the underprivileged socioeconomic segments within
societies, the shackles of strife can be broken resulting in the liberation of
poor from poverty.