Chapter 6: Economic Dependency Ratio as a Dimension of Poverty and Vulnerability

The first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), which is to be attained by the year 2030, is to ‘End poverty in all its forms everywhere’.¹ However, the progress made in reducing poverty has been reversed due to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The worsening poverty, inequality and vulnerability call for identifying the acuteness of the problem with the help of dimensions like the economic dependency ratio along with other sources like poverty line, access to social security, health care, basic services, food security and asset ownership and social networks at the village to name a few. The economic dependency ratio goes beyond the age dependency ratio and tries to capture the dependency better by incorporating the number of dependants and employed ones in the calculation. In this study, an attempt has been made to highlight the importance of the economic dependency ratio to measure vulnerability better in India. Unemployment data provided by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) has been utilised to understand the severity of dependency at the country level. Primary data has been collected with the help of the Proportionate Stratified Sampling method from 600 notified, non-notified slum households staying in the western part of India and in-depth interviews have been conducted with a few homeless families. Quantitative data has been analysed using SPSS and Stata software.

This study will be immensely useful as it aims to improvise the methodology to identify the poor and vulnerable. Better identification can take us a step closer to achieving SDG 1.