The first thing that catches one’s attention on walking into Ambika Devi’s house, located deep inside a bylane at Chellamangalam ward in Thiruvananthapuram, is the humble grocery shop set up at the front verandah and extending to a part of the drawing room. The funding for the shop, a livelihood option tailor-made for her health condition, was provided to the 57-year-old widow along with the house, through the Kerala government’s Extreme Poverty Eradication Programme (EPEP).

“After my husband passed away seven years ago following a long battle with illnesses, I was living in our dilapidated house. But once a part of it collapsed, I went to live with my sister, where I stayed for two years. Last September, I got this house through EPEP,” says Ambika.

“In December,” says Ambika, “I got an initial funding of ₹50,000 from the project to set up the grocery shop. It was an option suggested by the Corporation officials as I could not walk much or take up any strenuous work. Since people from the neighbourhood regularly purchase from here now, I get just enough income to survive,” she says.

On November 1, when the Kerala government would declare the State as free from extreme poverty, the first State to make such a declaration, Ambika will be counted among the 59,277 families to be uplifted from extreme poverty. A study by NITI Aayog in 2021 had assessed Kerala’s poverty rate as 0.7%, the lowest in the country. The welfare policies pursued by the successive governments had succeeded in bringing down the poverty rate to the pre