Bangladesh has made modest gains in reducing poverty over the past decade and is setting itself a higher economic growth target to help raise living standards of the poor.
The draft Fifth Five Year Plan (FFYP) has emphasised the need for an annual growth rate of seven to eight per cent to make poverty reduction more effective.
According to the draft plan, the incidence of national poverty has declined from 52.3 per cent to 49.7 per cent during 1984-92. While urban poverty declined from 40.9 per cent to 33.6 per cent in this period, the proportion of the poor in the rural areas dropped from 53.8 per cent to 52.9 per cent, according to the document which quotes a survey report of the Household Expenditure Survey .
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Citing official data compiled for the poverty monitoring project, the plan also indicates a faster poverty reduction rate in subsequent years. According to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), the incidence of rural poverty was about 48 per cent in early 1995, about five per cent lower than the level in 1991-1992.
That poverty is declining during the first half of the nineties is also substantiated by other sources of statistics.
Planning officials attribute the improvement in rural living standards to a drastic reduction in rural population growth which has resulted from rapid rural-urban migration and a fall in the natural growth rate of population. The countrys population at present is about 123 million.
According to the report, the early nineties also saw a sharp decline in the incidence of extreme poverty from 26 per cent to 23 per cent.
While the proportion of villagers living in extreme vulnerable housing fell from nine per cent to two per cent during 1990-95, the number of people without minimum clothing declined from 15 per cent in 1990 to four per cent in 1995. The proportion of rural population without winter clothing also dropped from 22 per cent to seven per cent during the same period.
However, a recent UN Development Programme (UNDP) report said the billions of Takas spent by past governments on poverty alleviation programmes had made no difference. Rather the disparities between the rich and poor had widened.
Nearly 25 million Bangladeshis are among the worlds poorest people, according to the UNDP report, which estimated that about 50 million Bangladeshis are below the poverty line.
The report said that the reduction in rural poverty in Bangladesh was due to migration from villages to towns. At present 56 per cent of urban people and 51 per cent of the rural are below the poverty line, it estimated.
Earlier this year the UNDP report on human development in South Asia recommended setting up a South Asian Commission of eminent intellectuals to produce a report on a new vision for South Asia in the twenty-first century.
The commission should be a non-government initiative and it should produce its report before the end of 1998 and present it to the SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) summit scheduled to be held in 1999, the report said.