Rural poor behind national progress

RTM document highlights rural poverty among biggest development challenges

Ensuring sustainable livelihood and expanding decent employment is critically important to make a sustained progress in scaling down poverty levels.

This is one of the core ingredients of the 11th Round Table Meeting (held last week in Thimphu) document titled “Turning vision into reality: the development challenges confronting Bhutan.”

The issues remain relevant in the light of highly capital-intensive growth, driven by sectors that have not generated adequate employment opportunities.

Over the last three decades, living conditions have improved significantly from a time when virtually everyone was extremely poor. But poverty still affects the lives of around a quarter of the population. And the majority of the people live in rural areas.

The document states that the government remains firmly committed to various international development goals, including the MDGs and that of Saarc that place poverty reduction at the heart of development initiatives.

Further, poverty reduction is the 10th plan’s core objective with the target to bring down the population living below the national poverty line to below 15 percent from 23.

The Gross National Happiness (GNH) Development Framework views poverty within a broader and multi-dimensional context that takes into consideration various facets of human deprivation.

Activities that must accompany efforts to alleviate multi-dimensional poverty needs to be viewed within the larger context of integrated rural development. It includes the vitalization of local economies in rural areas that encompasses development of basic infrastructure like roads, electricity, and essential social services.

The Bhutan Poverty Analysis Report (PAR) of 2007 states that people below the national poverty line earned Nu 1,097 a month.

The figure is less than US$ 1.25 a day, the new international poverty line. Therefore, most poor in Bhutan can be categorized as the chronic poor.

More than 146,000 Bhutanese are poor with 98 percent of them living in rural areas. However, poverty rate has witnessed a progressive decline from 36.3 percent in 2000, 31.7 percent in 2003 to 23.2 percent in 2007. The scenario places the country on track to achieve its MDG target of halving the poor.

According to the Bhutan PAR of 2007, about 5.9 percent of the population suffer from food poverty or consume less than 2,124 kilocalories a day, an increase from 2003 when only 3.8 percent of the population lived below the minimum level of dietary energy consumption.

In absolute terms, this translates to around 37,300 individuals living below the food poverty line. Food poverty is mostly prevalent in rural communities.

Some of the main causes of food poverty in Bhutan are low food production and extensive crop destruction by wild animals and pests. Others include limited access to land, other production assets and inputs, poor food utilization, and weak access to roads and markets.

Poor people of five poorest dzongkhags account for half of all the poor with their poverty incidence twice as high as the prevailing national poverty incidence.

The eastern, southern and central parts of the country are much poorer with poverty particularly severe in Zhemgang, Samtse, Mongar, and Lhuentse. In Zhemgang, 52.9 percent of the population lives under the national poverty line and 17.8 percent are in food poverty.

Most of these poor districts are characterized by their distance from the core urban centres and the capital and relatively dense population and high out-bound migration.

The geographical isolation, limited access to road, access to other physical infrastructure, weaker resource base, and lower levels of socio-economic development, and economic activities also have roles in keeping the people in poverty.

The document says that there are numerous development challenges ahead, particularly to bring numerous vulnerable and isolated rural communities into the mainstream development process.

To address poverty in a more holistic sense, the government is analyzing the multi-dimensional poverty situation in the country to supplement its income poverty perspectives.

Some of the key drivers of poverty reduction, according to the document, are access to road, electricity, education and health attainment, and land welfare.

By Sonam Pelden