Giving Compass' Take:

• India Development Review examines inequality in India and how efforts to close the wide wealth chasm will require going at the root causes and strengthening "enablers" like access to quality education.

• NGOs can help boost those "enablers" in partnership with policymakers, but it will require a long-term commitment and an understanding of the whole Indian ecosystem.

• Learn how a holistic approach is improving workforce readiness in the region.

India is the second most unequal economy in the world after Russia, according to a 2017 Oxfam report entitled "An economy for the 99%." More sobering is the fact that even the people we might consider to be middle-class in India are really quite poor.

According to a study by Pew Research Center, even though India’s poverty rate fell from 35 percent in 2001 to 20 percent in 2011, the population that could be considered middle income saw only a marginal increase, going from about one percent to just three percent. This means that instead of a swelling middle class, India saw a movement of its population from poor to low-income earners.

The study pointed out that, “these were people hovering closer to $2 than $10 in daily income, and thus still a ways from the transition to middle-income status.” At that income threshold, a large proportion of Indians are at the edge of the global poverty line, possibly only one economic or health shock away from slipping back into poverty.

Given the sheer size of the problem, it would be infeasible for India to address this problem through transfers of wealth from the tiny sliver of high- and middle-income people (three percent of the population) to the poor and low-income (97 percent). The focus of the effort must instead lie in improving the environmental constraints that keep people in poverty and strengthening the enablers that can allow them to take charge of their own lives.

Read the full article about addressing underlying factors of poverty in India by Rahul Ahluwalia, Yamini Atmavilas and Nachiket Mor at India Development Review.