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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Facts, not outrage

Facts, not outrage

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published Published on Mar 22, 2012   modified Modified on Mar 22, 2012
-The Business Standard

Public discussion on falling poverty hits a new low

The Lok Sabha was adjourned for a short duration on Wednesday following an uproar over the government’s latest figures for poverty. This follows widespread public outrage at those figures. A dispassionate observer of this discussion may be led to conclude that either poverty has risen dramatically or the government has somehow fudged the figures inexcusably and obviously. Elsewhere perhaps, but not in India. That neither of those statements is even close to being the truth reveals much about the economic illiteracy that cripples public debate in India. What can be said about the quality of the public sphere in a nation where the largest and fastest fall of poverty in its history is met with such widespread anger? A strange coalition of the political Opposition and professional poverty boosters has served to obscure the details of this achievement.

Some anger has coalesced around the figures presented for the poverty lines. These are Rs 29 a day per capita for urban areas and Rs 22 a day per capita for rural areas. This is a straightforward extrapolation to 2009-10 of figures presented by the Tendulkar Committee for 2004-05. The figures that the Planning Commission presented to the Supreme Court last year were extrapolations (though arrived at differently) for 2011. Given the rise in prices between 2009-10 and 2011, the latter’s figure (the famed Rs 32 line) will of course be higher. Accusations that the government is rigging the figures are, therefore, spurious. It appears that those who wish to be outraged by the lines will be outraged; facts are, after all, coldly emotionless and will only adulterate the pristine purity of their outrage. The results, if anyone had cared to actually examine them, are based on the 66th round of the National Sample Survey of household consumer expenditure. They showed that the percentage of Indians below the poverty line had declined in the five years after the previous survey in 2004-05 by 7.4 percentage points, from 37.2 per cent in 2004-05 to 29.8 per cent in 2009-10. Rural poverty declined by eight percentage points. Many states, like Orissa, saw a decline of over 10 percentage points. This is the fastest rate of poverty reduction in India’s history. And for the first time, the absolute number of poor people has declined.

In a different country, there would have been public celebration. But India’s political and policy culture seems predicated on the assumption that poverty will always increase; it is quite flummoxed when the opposite happens, and is much happier pretending it just didn’t happen. Anger will then focus on questions such as: who can live on Rs 29 a day? The answer is, tragically, far too many people are still forced to. Yet the widespread avoidance of the basic fact that many people who used to have real incomes of that level are now doing better would be laughable if it was not so dangerous. The largest fall in poverty in history has happened, and it has happened as a consequence of high growth and buoyant tax revenue. National conversation should focus on how to sustain this drop and recreate the conditions in which it happened. But that would require looking at the facts. And outrage is so much more satisfying.

The Business Standard, 22 March, 2012, http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/facts-not-outrage/468559/


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