Poverty is the state of one who lacks a usual or socially
acceptable amount of money or material possession.It is aid to exist when some people lack the means to satisfy basic needs.In context,identification of poor people first requires a determination of what constitutes the basic needs.They may be defined as narrowly as ”those necessary for their survival” or as broadly as “those reflecting the prevailing standard of living in the community.” The first criteria would cover those people who are near the borderline of starvation or death from exposure; the second criteria would extend to the people whose nutrition, housing, and clothing, though adequate to preserve life, do not measure up to the ones from the population as a whole. The problem of definition is further compounded by noneconomic connotations that the word poverty has acquired. Poverty has been associated with low levels of education,poor health or skills,the inability or an unwillingness to work, high rates of disruptive behaviour, and improvidence. While these attributes have often been found to exist with poverty, their inclusion in a definition of poverty would obscure the relation between them along with the inability to provide for one’s basic needs. Whatever definition one uses, authorities and laypersons alike commonly assume that the effects of poverty are harmful to both society and the individuals.Although poverty is a phenomena as old as the history of human,the significance of poverty has changed over time. Under traditional (non- industrialized) modes of economic production, widespread poverty has been accepted as inevitable. The total output of goods and services, even if equally distributed, would still have been insufficient to give the entire population a comfortable standard of living by prevailing standards. With the economic productivity which resulted from industrialization, however, this ceased to be the case—especially in the world’s most industrialized countries, where national outputs were sufficient to raise the entire population to a comfortable level if necessary redistribution could be arranged without adversely affecting the output. Several types of poverty may be distinguished depending on those factors as time or duration (long- or short-term or cyclical) and distribution (widespread construction). Cyclical poverty refers to poverty which may be widespread throughout a population, but the occurrence is of limited duration. In non-industrial societies,the inability to provide for one’s basic needs rests mainly on temporary food shortages caused by natural phenomena. Prices may rise because of scarcities of food, which brought widespread,albeit temporary, misery. In contrast to cyclical poverty, which is temporary, widespread or “collective” poverty includes a relatively permanent insufficiency of means to secure all sorts of basic needs. Both generalized and concentrated collective poverty are transmitted from generation to generation. On the other hand, concentrated collective poverty occurs when the collective poverty described above is suffered by specific subgroups within a society, or localized in particular communities or regions that are devoid of industry, good-paying jobs, and that lack access to fresh and healthy food. Poverty is a social evil, we can also contribute to control it. For example-one can simply donate old clothes to poor people,can also sponsor the education of a poor child or utilize our free time by teaching poor students.Remember before wasting food, somebody is still sleeping hungry.