ABSTRACT
Poverty is a curse for human civilisation and its effect in the society is pervasive. However, the incidence and dimension have never been uniform across the regions and communities. It is interesting to note that urban poverty decreased during the first decade of the current century in most of the states of India. But the incidence has increased in the North-Eastern states of the country, especially Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland during the last seven years. Moreover, the situation of SC, ST and OBC has not been changed significantly. While talking of social groups data for the entire country, the data reveals that in the rural areas, poverty is concentrated mostly among the ST (47.4 per cent) population which is followed by SC (42.3 per cent), OBC (31.9 per cent) respectively though the overall figure is 33.8 per cent. However, in urban areas 34.1 per cent of SC, 30.4 per cent of ST and 24.3 per cent of OBCs belong to Below Poverty Line (BPL) against the overall figure of 20.9 per cent for all classes. The objective of the paper is to examine the extent and intensity of poverty among the urban scheduled cast population of Barpeta on the basis of Tendulkar Committee fixation of minimum expenditure level (Rs.871/-) for poverty in Assam. A number of statistics like headcount index, poverty gap and the squared poverty gap and Foster, Greer and Thorbecke model are used. Here, incidence of poverty is examined by using a multi-dimensional poverty index. The effort is also to highlight various factors responsible for the observed pattern of poverty in the study area of Assam.
