In per capita consumption per month or per household income per month, Odisha holds on to the fourth poorest State nationally.
The State with a whopping around 30 per cent households earning below Rs 5,000 a month trailed at fourth among the top-5 States, after Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, with a maximum proportion of households earning below the Rs 5,000 per month level in the country. Such a revelation has come to the fore by the recently-released ‘5th Employment-Unemployment 2015-16’ report by the labour Bureau.
Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand have stayed a cut above Odisha in this vital per household income/month. Interestingly, in the poverty line proportion based on the Tendulkar methodology that took per capita expenditure per month, Odisha was also 4th poorest following the States like Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar.
Significantly, when experts themselves differ over the poverty line estimates, as proved by two different sets of BPl proportion for Odisha estimated by Tendulkar (32.6%) and Rangarajan (45.9%) for the same year of 2011-12, the indicator of earning per household per month, however, remains undisputed in determining the actual poverty level or deprivation of sort among people in a State. And figures show Odisha among the top-5 poor States nationally, even far behind the six north-eastern States of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Manipur, Tripura and Nagaland.
The deprivation in Odisha vis-a-vis nationally could well be ascertained from the fact that when a mere around 23 per cent of households in Odisha earn above Rs 10,000 or more per month, nationally the proportion stood at a sizeable figure of over 33 per cent. Significantly, the fact, however, is Odisha is not alone; rather almost all the BIMARU States, except Rajasthan, have almost an equivalent proportion of households earning Rs 10,000 plus per month.
Rural Odisha stood the worst as nearly one-third (32.9%) households there have monthly earning below Rs 5,000 compared to mere 12.9 per cent urban households in the State. The reason: A whopping 77 per cent households in the rural Odisha have none in the family taking up any employment on wage or salary.
But when it comes to employed persons in a household in rural Odisha, a mere 3.7 per cent of households didn’t have any job at hand to make an earning. This fact further brings to fore how the job opportunities profile in the State are mostly of casual in nature. For this, the report estimated the unemployment rate in rural areas at around 5 per cent. The unemployment rate in urban areas too is at 5 per cent, reveals the report.
The enormity of jobs, even casual in nature, drought is vindicated by the fact that only 46 per cent of households in Odisha could get work for full 12 months, and 4 per cent couldn’t get any work for any period despite being searching for work. In this context, the shocker for the State is only 25.6 per cent of households have benefitted from employment generating schemes like MGNREGA.