Poverty and Social Development in West Bengal

Defining poverty requires a way of distinguishing the poor from the non-poor. The usual method is to classify an individual as poor, if he or she does not meet a set of consumption norms. The poverty lines used are generally based on the cost of a fixed bundle of goods deemed necessary for subsistence mostly on nutritional grounds. The use of upper poverty line $370, gives an estimate of 1115 million people in the developing countries in poverty in 1985, which is roughly one-third of the total population of the developing world. The extremely poor were 630 million which is 18 percent of the total population of the developing world, whose annual income was less than $275.