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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Poverty of numbers


The cynics have a hierarchy on facts — lies, damned lies and statistics! But, modern economies live on numbers and economists love numbers. So, one must be deferential towards statisticians and statistics. Even so, India’s poverty numbers and their repeated re-engineering test one’s patience. It is possible to imagine that there would be as many estimates of poverty in India as there are estimates of it. So, one should not normally make much of statistical differences. Except, there is something seriously wrong with a statistical system or with professional economics if the estimates vary as much as they do. A committee constituted by the Planning Commission and headed by eminent economist Suresh Tendulkar has now concluded that 37.2 per cent of India’s population lives below the poverty line (BPL). The Tendulkar panel estimate is higher than an earlier Planning Commission estimate that concluded that only 27.5 per cent of India’s population lives below the poverty line. Both these estimates fall hugely below the fantastic number put out by the Arjun Sengupta committee that estimated the number to be 77 per cent. Offering yet another number, a committee chaired by another former Planning Commission member N C Saxena estimated the BPL population at 50 per cent.

All this would be good grist for political and academic mills and of little consequence for the poor but for the fact that the government now wants to bring in a food security Bill that will assure food to all BPL families. So, being counted in is important. While malpractices in the identification of the poor for issuing the BPL cards are well known, the fact is that a large number of the genuinely poor are still left out. The government’s fiscal bravado in going down this path can only be admired given that in some states there are more BPL families than the total number of families! Many state governments may have their own view on the exact number of poor given the state’s capacity to implement food security and other welfare programmes. Many chief ministers have already sought greater freedom in deciding the cut-off line for food security commitments. A consensus-based and an easily applicable yardstick for determining poverty and estimating number of BPL families is, therefore, called for. That, however, is easier said than done, with many in the government, and in the ruling Congress party, bent on adopting the most liberal definition of poverty. Indeed, the best option could well be to go in for a universal, self-targeted public distribution system rather than one based on estimating and identifying beneficiaries. Tamil Nadu and Chattisgarh offer good models of a pro-poor food security scheme based on a public distribution system that other states can learn from.