-The Business Standard How to take hot air out of the poverty debate Once again, poverty estimations are creating a needless debate over what is a modest measurement problem. For many years since 1973, the government had followed a simple formula: if a household could not afford to buy a minimal number of calories and clothing for its members, it was deemed as a household below the Planning Commission poverty line....

-PTI About 60 per cent of India's rural population lives on less than Rs 35 a day and nearly as many in cities live on Rs 66 a day, reveals a government survey on income and expenditure. "In terms of average per capita daily expenditure, it comes out to be about Rs 35 in rural and Rs 66 in urban India. About 60 per cent of the population live with these expenditures...

-The Business Standard The average per capita expenditure of Indians cited in the preface to the consumption expenditure report of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) has added some new numbers to the poverty debate, prompting economists to warn against straightaway inferring poverty from the dreary figures. While the report itself was released last year, its preface by NSSO director-general J Dash is now reeling out new numbers which are keeping the...

Here is a new set of official statistics that can escalate the politically contentious debate on what constitutes the poverty line. If the average monthly consumption expenditure is taken as the benchmark of what an individual needs to survive, the poverty linewould be Rs 66.10 for urban areas and Rs 35.10 for rural regions, while about 65% of the population will be below this cutoff. The figures, based on the 66th round...

The robust 9 per cent –plus growth in South Asia till 2010, driven largely by India, where it came down to around 7 per cent in 2011-12, had one major qualifier: it was mostly associated with a rapid rise in labour productivity rather than an expansion in employment, according to the latest report Global Employment Trends from International Labour Office. Up until the end of the millennium, that is just a...