Poverty line set to rise, number of poor to swell

The poverty bar will soon be raised. With it, 38 per cent of India’s population will fall below the poverty line, instead of 28.5 per cent, as at present. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Oct 12, 2009, 01:34:56 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The poverty bar will soon be raised. With it, 38 per cent of India’s population will fall below the poverty line, instead of 28.5 per cent, as at present.

A family of five with an income of less than Rs 3,000 a month in urban and Rs 2,250 in rural areas should be considered poor, says the interim report of a committee directed by the Planning Commission to formulate fresh criteria for determining how poverty should be defined.

At present, using standards laid down in 1998, an urban family earning Rs 2,200 per month or less and a rural family earning Rs 1,650 or less is ‘poor’.

The raised bar will lead to many more people being classified poor. While urban poverty will increase slightly from 26 per cent to 28 per cent, rural poverty will jump from 30 per cent to 46 per cent.

“The report, once accepted, will resolve disparities in urban and rural poverty and make poverty estimation more equitable,” said Planning Commission member Abhijit Sen.

Headed by Suresh Tendulkar, former chief of the PM’s economic advisory council, the committee looked at more parameters than its predecessors.

Earlier, a family was called poor only if it lacked the income to buy food containing a minimum number of calories per day — 2100 calories for urban areas and 2400 for rural areas.

Tendulkar’s committee, however, has estimated the minimum income required to rise above poverty by looking at expenditure on education, health and sanitation too – apart from food. It has also recommended that no distinction should be made between urban and rural households as far as calorie intake.

“We will fine tune our observations and submit the final report next month,” Tendulkar told HT.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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