‘We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.’ Generally, or in common parlance, a ‘poor’ is that person who does not have sufficient amount of money to purchase food to keep him and the members of his family alive and the necessary clothing and a shelter in the form of a house.
These are the persons who do not have a proper diet, no shelter or have depleted shelter, live in insanitary conditions, and have a lower life expectancy than the majority of population. Their house is often overcrowded.
Many of them sleep on streets, subways, footpaths, doorways or park benches under the open sky. In extreme winter, they sometimes freeze to death in certain areas. In rural areas, they live in mud thatched small huts and in urban areas in ghettos (slums), devoid of all basic utilities—water, latrines, bathrooms, electricity, etc. Thus, such persons must be defined as poor, no matter whether society recognizes their poverty or not.