‘Despite implementation of various programmes for eradication of poverty by the government in India, poverty is still existing.’ Explain by giving reasons.

NITI Aayog's National Multidimensional Poverty Index shows headcount poverty falling from 24.85% (2015-16) to 14.96% (2019-21), with about 13.5 crore people escaping poverty — yet serious deprivation persists despite decades of anti-poverty programmes.

Why poverty survives the programmes

• Targeting failures: outdated BPL lists produce large exclusion and inclusion errors, so benefits often miss the poorest.
• Leakages and corruption in delivery chains dilute transfers, though DBT on JAM rails has narrowed the gap.
• Jobless growth: growth has been services- and capital-intensive; nearly 90% of workers remain informal with low, insecure earnings.
• Structural inequality: landlessness, caste and gender disadvantage and regional concentration of poverty (Bihar, Jharkhand, MP) reproduce deprivation across generations.
• Weak human capital: child stunting at 35.5% (NFHS-5) and poor-quality schooling trap families in low-productivity work.
• Shocks: catastrophic health spending, droughts, floods and COVID-19 repeatedly push escaped households back below the line.
• Fragmentation: dozens of overlapping schemes without convergence dissipate resources, leaving per-family support too thin to lift households permanently.

Poverty removal therefore needs more than schemes: quality job creation, universal health cover on the Ayushman Bharat model, sustained nutrition and education investment, and convergent, mission-mode delivery as attempted in the Aspirational Districts Programme — attacking causes, not merely symptoms.