How we have come to define poverty has had a major impact on how we come to understand and address it. Thanks to the Northern Aid Industrial Complex, poverty is defined and/ or measured in multiple ways. For instance, the International Poverty Line (IPL), perhaps the most popular measurement of poverty, and designed by the World Bank, looks at changes in periodic intervals in the cost of living for basic food, clothing and shelter.

The latest IPL estimate was set at $1.90 per day which in 2015 put approximately 50 million people in Pakistan under the poverty line, with numbers expected to grow. Ironically, the then UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Phillip Alston, ended his five-year tenure in 2020, by declaring that the world placed a “misplaced reliance” on the World Bank’s IPL measurement which skews the conversation and distorts reality as a one-size-fits-all. The real threshold of existing extreme poverty is actually three to four times higher.

Similarly, the UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI), has been a consistent measure of a country’s levels of life expectancy, schooling and Gross National Index (GNI). Pakistan scored 154^th out of 167 in the latest (2020) Index, despite increases in these indicators over the years.

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are yet another measure of 17 social sector indicators to which countries, including Pakistan, are beholden in front of a global audience. In Pakistan, the use of poverty scorecards has been common, a proxy means test developed based on the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement (PSLM) Survey.

But despite these many quantitative means to ascertain a country’s standard of living, poverty remains a very abstract term. How people live is a mix of both pre-determined factors, such as access to wealth and state resources and personal choices of how to accumulate or spend those resources. The most common argument for poverty is that it is not a personal choice but a political one. Rather, people are pushed into poverty because of factors beyond their control, such as state apathy and/ or incompetence, political interests, historical marginalisation, conflict and uneven control and distribution of wealth.

This is true to a certain extent. People don’t consciously choose to live in poverty. Who would? But getting out of poverty, which is entirely possible, is both a political and a personal exercise. Opportunities and incentives to raise people out of poverty must be available for this to happen but people must also want to avail of those opportunities to the maximum. This is easier when opportunities are purely economic and monetary.

Scholars such as Amartya Sen and Robert Chambers began highlighting the problems in poverty measurements in the 1990s. Their arguments include that the determinants and levels of poverty vary across time and countries.

But one of the issues with poverty being largely measured through quantitative means, even of social indicators such as education and health opportunities, is that it misses out on the psycho-social elements that determine why and how people want to avail of such opportunities – and why they don’t. These elements include why people want better-paying jobs, but are still not inclined to send their children to school; or why so many do not believe in modern medical science but still spend thousands of rupees in trying to get medical care for their sick families.

Because poverty or the solution to poverty is not just about money, or the lack of it, it is also about the cultural and social barriers to the protection and enforcement of human rights, which equally lead to an improved standard of living — measures that are not part of the traditional definitions of poverty. This is why programmes such as micro-credit lending, basic income support and vocational training have not been entirely successful because they address only part of the problem. You could provide families with additional income and it will automatically show “poverty levels” decreasing in terms of numbers. But if those families continue to follow outdated social and cultural norms, such as physical and social abuse, or lack of spending on education and health, then has poverty really decreased?

Scholars such as Amartya Sen and Robert Chambers began highlighting the problems of poverty measurements in the 1990s. Their arguments include that the determinants and levels of poverty vary across time and countries, as do standards of living and that vulnerability (also a popular assessment indicator for poverty) is not the same as poverty.

Following this, developments in the field of social policy and research, attempted to blend the quantitative and qualitative effects of poverty, through poverty well-being assessments which consider the impact of poverty on children’s development for instance, or on mental health outcomes, or lack of appropriate shelter. But these attempts are highly contextualised, such as in Pakistan where child rights are not even acknowledged as a basic human right, let alone mental well-being, as recent events have illustrated.

More importantly, reconciling the qualitative and quantitative aspects of poverty is problematic, simply because societal well-being is not limited to income. “Rich” families may possess even less well-being indicators despite their wealth, as is evident in the enormous wealth gap in Pakistan or the fact that the state does not even encourage a basic minimum wage for the informal sector.

This reliance on the quantitative and monetised understanding of poverty, has turned it into a convenient excuse in Pakistan for lack of a better word, to simply not address our many societal gaps.

Indeed, Pakistan has used the excuse of poverty to skirt many issues. This was most apparent last year when, instead of prioritsing public heath, the government instead used the ghareeb awam excuse to avoid a total lockdown during the initial days of the pandemic.

Using poverty as an excuse is not new. Poverty has been weaponised by many countries to justify a lack of investment in crucial social infrastructure, including public health, education and women’s rights. Even the poor use this as a reason to regularly skirt such issues, blaming their ghareebi. Most people in Pakistan too backed the government’s reasoning of avoiding lockdowns during the pandemic, particularly daily wage earners, for exactly this reason.

But poverty of wealth does not necessarily mean the poverty of mind. Having six to eight children per household and then not being able to afford to feed them is not so much an issue of insufficient income but of a choice made not to accept birth control. Refusing to work and instead making one’s wife bring in the income (or not letting the wife work for that matter), is not an issue of poverty in an age where even two incomes are not enough, but of a mindset.

Marginalising and threatening the entire communities because of their belief systems isn’t because people can’t afford to spend on education. It’s because of generations of indoctrination by a dominant few.

Likewise, vaccine hesitancy isn’t an issue of poverty but of years of conditioning against vaccination by certain quarters. But even here, many who are reluctant to get vaccinated blame their monetary situation on not wanting to believe that Covid-19 is a reality.

So what sort of poverty measurement is applicable then in these scenarios? Or should we even bother to measure poverty, given the abstractness of the situation?

While the high-level political agenda is more obvious, it is the individual that is more of a concern. Why do so many in Pakistan use poverty as a reason not to do better by themselves? Why is it the reason used by the rich to underpay or abuse their employees? Why is it the reason all of us, rich or poor, use not to treat one another with dignity?

Poverty may be an excuse for the government spending less on people and more on themselves but people equally hide behind poverty to avoid having to change their ways, whether these are cultural, traditional or simply to maintain a power imbalance in families, communities and countries. Measuring poverty then becomes a futile exercise.

The writer is an independent professional with over 25 years of experience in   international   development, social policy,gender and global migration. She is based in Karachi.