-Live Mint No other social sector programme has been criticized for being successful as has the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). So much so that it is not the inefficiency of the MGNREGS that is a problem, but its success that is seen as the reason for several problems facing the country. Even though it is still a small programme with annual spending of less than Rs.35,000 crore,...
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On the Recent Poverty Estimates-Himanshu
An unnecessary controversy has been started by the release of the poverty estimates of 2009-10 by the planning commission. The controversy, which was entirely avoidable, was allowed to go on because of the poor handling of the issue by the planning commission. It is unfortunate that the planning commission was less than willing to own the Tendulkar committee report which was submitted in December 2009 and accepted by the commission...
More »The great Indian poverty debate-Mythili Bhusnurmath
The great poverty debate has been re-ignited, pitting liberal, pro-market economists against left-of-centre economists of the JNU genre. Is the Tendulkar Committee's poverty line - expenditure of 32 a day in urban areas and 26 in rural areas -an affront to the poor, an estimate that could only have been made by a committee whose members had never known a day's poverty themselves? Or is it a realistic estimate of what...
More »A very crooked line-Prahlad Shekhawat
It is worrying that the Tendulkar method, chosen by the Planning Commission to calculate the poverty line in its latest figures, underestimates the levels of poverty while overestimating poverty reduction. The figures show that 29.8% or 360 million Indians were poor in 2009-10 as compared to 37.2% or 400 million in 2004-05. A poor person has been defined as one who spends R28 per day in urban areas and R22.5...
More »The poverty wars and impossibly low poverty line of India by V Raghunathan
Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar (TOI March 25 and ET March 28) has strongly defended the Planning Commission's stance that there is nothing amiss with the poverty line drawn at Rs 22.40 in rural areas and Rs 28.65 in urban areas (down from initial estimates of Rs 32 and Rs 26, respectively). Let us discount the copious tears being shed by various politicians and their parties on this new line of poverty...
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