The Planning Commission, headed by the prime minister, has filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court quantifying the daily poverty line for an adult as Rs 26 in rural, and Rs 32 in urban India. At today’s relentlessly increasing prices, Rs 26 will not get a manual worker even one nutritious meal a day — leave alone the 2,400 calories he is required to eat to enable him to work,...
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Subsidising through prices: A bad idea by Bibek Debroy
The acronym LPG has several expansions. It stands for liquefied petroleum gas. It stands for liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation, a term of abuse used by those with Leftwing persuasions. It stands for life plundered by the government, sentiments associated with those who are against state intervention, but increasingly felt by the so-called middle class - however defined - because of price hikes, and proposed price hikes, for petroleum products. Ostensibly, price...
More »1 in 5 Mumbaikars below poverty line by Linah Baliga
Twenty percent of people in the country's most populous city are below the poverty line (BPL). For Mumbai's population of about 1.25 crore, that means 25 lakh BPL people. This makes the number of those living in abject poverty in the city 4 lakh more than the population of say Nashik. The BPL figure comes from a survey carried out by the BMC in 2005-06 . The criterion was an income...
More »Government in damage control mode; no decision on BPL yet by Smita Gupta
Planning Commission affidavit not to be taken as the last word' An embarrassed government swung into damage control mode on Wednesday, in response to widespread criticism of an affidavit filed by the Planning Commission that suggested that an individual income of just Rs 25 a day constituted adequate “private expenditure on food, education and health,” at a time when even the minimum wage was pegged at over Rs.100 a day, the...
More »Govt to make poverty line more realistic
-The Times of India Facing a political storm over its poverty line prescription, the government decided to revise the Rs 32 a day expenditure criteria for urban population (Rs 26 for rural) by factoring in the 2009-10 National Sample Survey Organization report on household spend. The pittance outlined in the Planning Commission affidavit before the Supreme Court left the government squirming as the BJP and Left attacked it for framing poverty guidelines...
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