Tackling poverty and inequality among farm households in Bihar: implications for achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs)

One of the main goals of SDGs is to remove of the poverty in its all forms and from everywhere. The present study examines the factors that are responsible for rural poverty; the relationship between poverty and inequality; and between poverty and debt-to-assets ratio among farm households in Bihar, one of the economically most backward states in India. We use primary data on consumption, income, and assets for the agricultural year 2010–11. The logit model has been applied to empirically identify the factors responsible for poverty. The study finds a strong positive, correlation between poverty and debtto-assets ratio, but not between inequality and poverty or any impact of inequality on poverty. The results indicate that poverty is more prevalent among the households having little access to land, livestock and other productive assets, low level of education, larger family size, and higher dependency ratio.