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Notice (8): Undefined variable: urlPrefix [APP/Template/Layout/printlayout.ctp, line 8]latest-news-updates/india-poor-for-sure-7883.html"/> LATEST NEWS UPDATES | India, poor for sure | Im4change.org
Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

India, poor for sure
-The Economic Times
 
Everyone knows poverty is rampant in India, but nobody knows exactly how many of us are poor. That's because we've tried to count the poor many times with different assumptions, and come up with widely different numbers. In 2004-05, the Planning Commission reckoned that only 27% of Indians were poor.

This was debunked by a committee headed by Suresh Tendulkar in 2009, which pegged the number of poor at 37% of the population. Around the same time, another committee headed by the late Arjun Sengupta estimated that a staggering 78% of Indians were poor and a panel headed by N C Saxena pegged the number at 50% of the population.

Last year, however, another study used a wide-ranging definition of poverty to conclude that 55% of Indians were below the poverty line. This profusion of numbers makes it hard to administer and deliver the vast amounts of money that India spends on poverty-reducing programmes: Rs 40,000 crore on the NREGS, a similar amount on a scheme for rural jobs, about Rs 10,000 crore in housing schemes for the poor and Rs 60,000 crore in food subsidies. So, the government's decision to conduct a census to identify the poor as well as their religion and caste is welcome.

It's also a good idea to measure poverty by asking whether the poor can afford education and healthcare for the family. To do that, the poverty census will have to focus on some measure of spending power — the norm used by many multilateral agencies is $1.25 a day, in PPP dollars. Counting for the census is just over and a lot of data from that will give a template against which the poverty data can be cross-referenced.

Of course, the government will face pressure from many state governments to scuttle or minimise the scope of the poverty census, but that's because many states run profitable rackets to siphon off anti-poverty finances. These pressures should be resisted. Finally, once the government has identified the poor, it should knock everybody else out of the list of beneficiaries. The Saxena panel found that 17% of India's richest people continue to have access to BPL facilities while more than 50% of the poor do not. That has to end.