Rural and urban poverty
Whether you live in rural or urban poverty you are effected by it greatly. Poverty has cause high infant mortality rates and lowered the life expectancy rates. In fact in the 1950s the infant mortality rate in India was 146 deaths per a thousand births but it had now dropped to 85 at the beginning of this decade. There is no general classification of the people that live in poverty but there are certain aspects that affect it. For instance based on your gender, literacy, land ownership, employment status and caste can affect whether you will live in poverty or not.
“Those that are landless and have no other source of income [are the poorest]. Some are labourers... They survive with great difficulty. If they get a wage one day they may be without work for three to four days. Their household runs with support from neighbours – if they are better off – and others in the village. They help out. And those that earn well in farming give wheat grain. Some people also give money. That is how the poor survive. There is a lot of poverty in this village.”
- Muhammad Naveed, Pakistan
Rural poverty
The majority of poverty in South Asia is rural (four-fifths) but living in either rural or urban poverty is still difficult none-the-less. Rural poverty has greatly declined in the past few years but is still not where we would like it to be at. However, despite urbanization the numbers are not declining as expected. Looking at this from a worldwide view at least 70% (about a billion people) of the world's extremely poor people live in rural areas. Also, when you take into effect that South Asia holds 15% of the world's population makes these statistics even more shocking. Out of all regions and sub-regions South Asia has the most massively poor rural people (500 million) and of South Asia, India holds the largest concentration of poor people in the world. Rural poverty affects the people making a living as farmers and do not live in large cities.
Urban Poverty
As rural poverty decreased urban poverty rose in numbers. Urban poverty is a trickier situation than rural because all the ways rural poverty has been addressed do not work in urban areas. Therefore organizations need a better understanding of urban poverty in order to approach in aiding the poverty stricken areas. There may be more rural poverty than urban but urban suffers greatly too. Recent discoveries show that food insecurity is a greater issue for urban than rural. Statistics show that the urban poor pay as much as 30% more for food. Urban poverty also effects parents relationships with their children for it sometimes requires women to work out of their homes thus preventing them from caring for their children.
comparison
It is difficult to compare rural and urban poverty because they are very different. For rural poverty it is lack of land, lack of employment or unavailability of services. On the other hand urban poverty is not really the lack of unemployment as much as it is the absence of basic services. This is because the majority of urban poverty is considered the "working poor." Despite the urban poor having higher incomes than the rural poor they still do not have enough money for basic necessities because the higher income is removed by multiple costs.