-The Hindu Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, responds to P. Sainath: The article “The austerity of the affluent” (The Hindu, May 21, 2012), is so misleadingly distortive on two points that I feel compelled to clarify the position. I have high regard for your newspaper, and subscribe to the notion that there should be full transparency in government. It is in this spirit that I hope these clarifications...

-The Telegraph The government today set up an expert committee to suggest a new methodology for determining who is poor and who is not, following widespread condemnation of its existing criteria last year. However, the five-member committee headed by C. Rangarajan, chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, will also examine the existing methodology, which was suggested by a previous expert panel formed under Suresh Tendulkar. Tendulkar’s methodology was solely based on...

-The Hindustan Times The government on Thursday put the controversial poverty estimation in a deep freeze by appointing a new expert group to recommend a new estimation methodology aimed at linking government subsidies to poor. The group to be led by C Rangarajan, head of Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council and having three others members is expected to submit its report in nine months, minister of planning Ashwini Kumar told reporters. However, not...

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 Planning Commission drew flak when it calculated that if an urban person spent 28 per head every day and someone in rural areas spent 22, that was enough to consider them to be above the poverty line. These figures are based on consumption expenditure data collected in the 66th round of NSSO for 2009-10. From these new estimates, using the Tendulkar Committee methodology, the number of poor in 2009-10 was...