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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | ‘Plan panel shouldn’t fix poverty figures’

‘Plan panel shouldn’t fix poverty figures’

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published Published on Aug 7, 2013   modified Modified on Aug 7, 2013
-The Times of India


NEW DELHI: Eliminating Planning Commission's role in etching the poverty line and instead tasking expert government agencies to determine India's below poverty line population may help depoliticize the exercise, a former top NSSO official has said.

Former director-general of National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) Jogeshwar Dash feels the Planning Commission's mandate of framing policy clashes with estimating poverty ratios that are an outcome of strategies the panel devises.

"Poverty ratios are outcome parameters. Both monitoring and measuring results should not be the job of one organization," said Dash, who headed NSSO till July, 2012.

The former official said controversies kicked up by poverty line estimates has convinced him that the formula adopted by the planning commission in assessing the poverty line is vulnerable to political attacks that force the panel to junk the figures almost as soon as they are released.

"It would be much better if the national statistical commission took over the task of computing poverty ratios independently," he said.

Rather than formulae based on purchasing power parity and weighted indices, NSS data on consumption expenditure according to decile class of population and reports on nutritional intake can provide a straight forward estimate of poverty.

"Rough estimates derived from NSS report on nutritional intake suggest that rural and urban poverty ratios calculated from a calorie intake of 2,400 and 2,100 a day, respectively, are 43.9 for rural and 27.7 urban in 2009-10," Dash said.

These ratios are much higher than the Planning Commission's latest estimate that 22% of India's population is below the poverty line.

Panel members have said while the number of people below the poverty line went up marginally between 1993-94 and 2004-05, they fell dramatically from 41 crore in 2004-05 to 27 crore in 2011-12.

This method means a dramatic increase in the number of poor, but a measure based on calorific intake of population segments may be a more accurate pointer than a complex calculation of minimum expenditure to make ends meet.

The poverty line of Rs 29 a day and the reduction of the calorific bar for individual consumption has proved problematic with the planning commission coming under all around attack, even from within the Congress.

Instead of being forced to issue clarifications and disclaimers that the poverty line is not a benchmark for access to benefits, a more transparent calculation based on publicly available date may make the BPL computation more believable.


The Times of India, 6 August, 2013, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Plan-panel-shouldnt-fix-poverty-figures/articleshow/21635369.cms


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