Poverty of statistics

The Planning Commission's submission to the Supreme Court, defining the poor to be those with daily spending not exceeding Rs 31 in urban and Rs 25 in the rural areas is politically and economically indefensible. Such a crude cut-off, derived from the Suresh Tendulkar Committee's methodology for estimation of poverty, raises questions over the official poverty ratio of 32 per cent for 2009-10 (which is based on the same methodology). It only confirms how the ‘Great Indian Poverty Debate' has been reduced to a bizarre ‘numbers game', with the World Bank pegging the poor at over 40 per cent in 2005 and another committee under the National Advisory Council member, N.C. Saxena, arriving at a figure of 50 per cent just before the Tendulkar panel released its report in late 2009. In the meantime, the Arjun Sengupta Committee reckoned the poor and ‘vulnerable' at 77 per cent of India's population. All of this may seem a bit comical, but for the fact that the joke is at the expense of the poor. For them, being officially entitled to below-poverty-line (BPL) status can be a matter of life and death, as it promises access to a host of welfare schemes from cheap grains at ration shops to subsidised housing under the Indira Awaas Yojana. 

This leads to the inescapable conclusion that abstract definitions of poverty lines must be done away with and replaced with more specific information reflecting the real living conditions of households. Take the findings of the 2001 Census: that 63.6 per cent of Indian households had no latrines and only 39 per cent had access to drinking water within their premises, or 52 per cent used firewood as cooking fuel and a mere 17.5 per cent LPG. There can be no better measures of backwardness, if not poverty. The 2011 Census numbers on these indicators are not yet out; once they are, we will get a more updated picture. The Rural Development Ministry has, moreover, launched its own country-wide BPL Census exercise, to be completed by 2011-12. This Census, too, employs transparent criteria for exclusion of families from the BPL list — those owning motorised vehicles (including tractors and harvesters), having Kisan Credit Cards with credit limit above Rs 50,000, holding a government job, and so on. 

Given the poor credibility of official poverty estimates — and the attendant risks of excluding even the genuinely needy from the ambit of welfare schemes — there is a case to shelve their usage for public policy purposes. The Government should, instead, wait for the results of both the BPL as well as the general Census. Simultaneously, it must streamline delivery systems, weed out ineffective programmes and prioritise self-selection schemes such as MGNREGA. These can be supplemented with intelligent use of technology, particularly biometric information-based Unique Identification cards, which probably hold the key for the future of social welfare.