Poverty of statistics

The Government of India has always affirmed its commitment to drastically reducing the number of people living below the poverty line (BPL). Unfortunately, its policies have not helped achieve this goal.

So it seems to have found a unique and simple solution to this sticky problem. When people are not moving above the ‘poverty line', just pull the ‘poverty line' down, so that more people appear to have gone above the line!

Otherwise, the Planning Commission would not have set urban and rural poverty thresholds roughly at Rs 20 and Rs 15 a day, accepting the Tendulkar Committee's report. This means people with a daily income of above Rs 20 in urban areas and Rs15 in rural areas are not entitled for to governmental subsidies and other support, such as low-cost food-grains.

What can we possibly buy with Rs 20 a day? Can our planners and policy-makers survive for a month if they are provided Rs 20 a day?

RIDICULOUS REASONING

Yet, they have their own calculations and methodologies to arrive at the limit of BPL income. Without going into too many technicalities, the present limit is the improvement recommended by the Tendulkar Committee. It suggested that poverty be estimated on the basis of consumption based on the cost-of-living index instead of caloric intake. It said that the basket of goods should also include services such as health and education. Earlier, the BPL was calculated based on the calorie requirement alone — the money required to buy the food which gives 2,400 calories to the people in rural areas and 2,100 calories in urban areas. Although the Tendulkar panel, however, included health and education, in addition to calorie intake, it cut the existing calorie limits in rural and urban areas to a uniform 1,800. One of the justifications shown for this is the minimum norm recently set by the Food and Agricultural Organisation. And the admirers of Tendulkar Committee have conveniently forgotten that the FAO had suggested this 1800 calorie norm as a minimum dietary energy requirement (MDER) for light or sedentary activity, but, not that applicable to the manual workers in rural and urban India.

EXCLUDING THE NEEDY

The Planning Commission has found that only 32 per cent of the people were below the poverty line in 2009-10, against 37.2 per cent in 2004-05. That means a large number of poor are going to be excluded from the government's anti-poverty programmes. As for the employment situation, 93 per cent of the workforce is either in employment of poor quality, unemployed or under-employed.

In contrast, there are 55 billionaires in India with combined wealth of $246.5 billion, equal to Rs 11 lakh crore as per the Forbes India rich list, 2011. This is more than the combined GDP of Pakistan ($174.86 billion) and Sri Lanka ($48.24 billion). So, it is very clear that growth in India has not resulted in equitable distribution of income. What is needed is an honest effort to bring all the poor into the fold of government support system, not excluding them through ill-conceived definitions and poor quality statistics.