The recent attempt to steer clear of the controversy arising out of the poverty estimation by the Suresh Tendulkar Committee may have given a temporary respite to the government but it has stirred a new debate among the socio-economic and policy analysts whether the whole criteria to count the poor should undergo a change. It has also made many think whether all the attempts made by the government to define poor for over three decades are only surreal.
From the time India first came up with the poverty line estimates in 1979 to the most recent Tendulkar Committee calculations, those in authority have only juggled with the number of India’s poor using different criteria. No one has come up with any definite set of measures to determine their actual percentage, let alone suggest measures to relieve them from their dire state.
Counting the rich
The swelling number of India’s poor ever since, has prompted economists to suggest the state machineries to adopt a simpler method of determining the exact number of poor in the country, which is, counting the rich instead of counting the whopping number of poor.
Although the government has put to rest the controversy, for now, by shifting the whole exercise of counting the poor to a later date, and by saying that data collected by the Socio Economic Caste Census, 2011 will be the basis for identifying those below the poverty line, the flawed approach to determine the poverty line has caused concern among socio-economic thinkers.
“It is important that we first determine how many poor persons live in India before we take steps to reduce poverty,” Jayati Ghosh of Centre for Economic Research and Planning told Deccan Herald. This also provokes every Indian to pause and rethink what we have achieved in the last three decades in terms of counting India’s poor. While the actual number of poor in the country has swollen over a period of time, our government’s documents tell a different tale.
While in 1973, a 54.9 per cent of population or more than half of India was below poverty line, it came down to 51.3 per cent in 1978, 44.5 per cent in 1983, 38.9 per cent in 1987, 36 per cent in 1993 and 25.7 per cent in 2004-05.
The claims of government agencies determining the poverty line have, nevertheless, invited sharp criticism at home and abroad. The UN Research Institute for Social Development had recently noted that the Indian government’s claims of poverty reduction are not reliable with its Director Thandika Mkandawire saying that Indian data is “always controversial”.
The recent National Sample Survey data too puts the number of poor close to 77 per cent. It says that while 235 million people are in a position to take care of themselves, a whopping 836 million people require assistance.
At this juncture, an effort by the Tendulkar Committtee to revise upwards the poverty line seems to only help the government reduce the number of poor from its books so that it can go ahead with curtailing subsidies and reducing its subsidy bill.
The report says that 37 per cent of people in India live below the poverty line and uses an arbitrary method based on an income of Rs 32 per day in urban area and Rs 26 in the rural prompting socio-economic thinkers to wonder whether it is just a poverty of imagination that exists in India where 67 out of 1,000 children die before the age of five due to malnutrition.
The recent poverty calculation done in Australia is worth taking a glance at. In Australia, the poverty line is periodically updated using an index of per capita household disposable income, which includes housing and other requirements. Accordingly, the poverty line for the June 2011 quarter, inclusive of housing cost was $3,354 per month. Comparing the Australian estimation with that of our own Planning Commission’s definition, an Indian BPL family has to be 42 times poorer than its Australian counterpart.
Analysts say that India too should take into account housing, education and the general living condition of the poor while calculating poverty. The poverty indicators adopted by the Human Development Index 2010 include years of schooling, child enrolment, mortality, nutrition, electricity, sanitation, drinking water, flooring, cooking fuel, and asset ownership.
Each of these indicators is given due weight while counting the number of poor. According to this calculation, the proportion of BPL families in India is 55.4 per cent. Bihar fares poorest, with 61.4 per cent of the people below the poverty line, while Kerala has only 40.9 per cent.
In a recent write up, Jeremy Seabrook, a renowned social and environmental researcher, rightly observed that poverty is slippery and elusive. It slides through the dexterous fingers of all the manipulators of figures and wielders of statistics. Should Indian policy makers give a thought to it?