Ahead of the much-awaited Suresh Tendulkar committee report on poverty estimation, another committee appointed by the rural development ministry has come out with its report. The committee, headed by N.C. Saxena, says that the percentage of rural population below the poverty line (BPL) could be as high as 50 per cent — the current estimate is 28.3 per cent.
The Saxena committee has come under fire for putting out such numbers. The Planning Commission has said the matter of fixing the percentage of BPL is “beyond the scope of the present committee and is being handled by a separate committee”. The Saxena committee says that the basis of Rs 365 per capita per month in rural area and Rs 539 per capita in urban areas resulted in people consuming “just about 1,820 kcalories (kcal)” of food as against the norm of 2,400-2,100 kcal (rural-urban). To achieve this, the “cut off line for determining BPL status should have been Rs 700 in rural areas and Rs 1,000 in urban areas”.
The rural development ministry has done three exercises to estimate poverty level over the past 17 years. But this time round, the Planning Commission has put its foot down and has said that fixing the rural poverty level at 50 per cent “will be considered arbitrary” and that such a recommendation would have “tremendous financial implications and once granted cannot be reduced”. The final word: wait for the Tendulkar committee report.
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Chudamani Ratnam
26 Sep, 2009 9:58 PM
Extract from a paper I published 5 years ago:Indian authorities set very low standards for various developmental indicators. For example the poverty line is defined by a daily food intake of just 2200 calories without any reference to other important nutritional and non-nutritional indicators. This was more correctly described at the earlier seminar here as a “line of destitution”. Similarly literacy, which is the bedrock of all other development, is defined as the ability to read ones name in ones mother tongue, whereas it would be desirable to introduce a term “functional literacy” which involves familiarity with a certain minimum vocabulary and the ability to read and write a few meaningful sentences. Some numerical ability could also be incorporated. This would reduce the literacy rate in India to less than 10% as against the generally accepted figure of a little over 60 %. Furthermore literacy by itself has no value and needs to be backed up with literature; everyone must be supplied with adequate quantities of reading matter such as newspapers, books, posters, etc. The targets for all other indicators need to be similarly raised to some meaningful level and not left at the abysmally low figures that are bandied around. If nothing else this will ensure that the authorities and other concerned people do not fool themselves into believing that all is well.