Out of Poverty :  What works when traditional approaches fail 

By : Paul Polak

To my mind, this is one of the most important books that I have read on the topic of poverty and how to get rid of the same.

The gist again, is simple : Go where the poverty is and observe it first hand. Live with the people for sometime and see why they are suffering. See what needs to be done to make them earn money for themselves.

No governmental organization and no world level organization - whether it is the gram panchanyats operated from Delhi or the world bank operated from God knows from where - tries to figure out why exactly people are poor.

Written by a man who has the personal experience and expertise on what he is talking about, and who started the International Development Enterprise (IDE), which is helping people around the world, this book is certainly an eye opener in thinking about poverty.

People are poor because they have no work sufficient enough to earn money. They don't have consistent work to get out of poverty. They may own land but they don't know what to sow and what agriculture they should do. They are all rain dependent. They are all people dependent. They also depend on a host of others for their equipment and so on. Can we get those equipments simplified? For example, can the drip irrigation be done at the fraction of the cost of how it is done in Israel? Can agricultural methods be taught to them so that they can get the crops going in a profitable manner? What are the practices which take away from making the profits? What makes agriculture very expensive? Can that be tackled?

Those are the questions the books asks. The author has lived in Napal. In India. In Indonesia. In vietnam. Where it really matters and has observed people in first hand. Has worked with them.

One simple line struck me : Don't give the rural poor people anything free. Teach them how to get work. Teach them how to make money and how to make it profitably. They can take care of themselves from then on.

Very true.