May 12: Starvation line or poverty line?
May 12, 2011http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-05-11/india/29531941_1_bpl-population-social-security-poverty
NEW DELHI: An urban Indian spending a penny more than Rs 578 a month – roughly Rs 20 a day – on all his basic needs cannot be termed poor and would not receive social benefits and subsidies given by the Centre to BPL citizens, the Planning Commission has said.
The commission told the Supreme Court on Tuesday that a city dweller cannot be termed poor if his average monthly spends exceed Rs 31 on rent and conveyance, Rs 18 on education, Rs 25 on medicines or Rs 36.5 on vegetables. It said these were the average monthly expenditure levels per capita across the country it was using to decide the official ‘poverty line’.
Critics have called it the starvation line – a spending level below which people would be rendered destitute.
The government’s eligibility criteria for the rural poor is even more stringent. If a villager spends more than Rs 15 a day he is not poor, according to the Plan panel’s statisticians.
Based on these consumption levels, the commission has declared that only 41.8% of the rural population is poor and a mere 25.7% of the urban Indians need food, shelter and social benefits from the government.
The commission’s figures are based on 2004-05 prices. But even at current price levels, these cutoffs are pretty low – around Rs 35 a day for urban dwellers and Rs 20 for rural Indians – experts said on the basis of back-of-envelope calculations.
These experts pointed out that when the government pushes for the Food Security Bill and other social schemes, it would be using these cutoffs to keep people out of the social security net. Anyone spending more than this will be denied subsidized food, accommodation, pensions and medical treatment targeted at the BPL population.
The Union government argued in Supreme Court that these are merely the Centre’s cutoffs. The states can shell out money from their own pockets for others they find ‘poor’. The government, however, admitted that states have been crying foul over this for long. But the Centre blamed the states for incorrectly identifying the beneficiaries of BPL programmes.
These cutoffs will help the Centre claim that poverty in the country is low and getting lower. In material terms, this will reduce the government’s subsidy ‘burden’ in the future.
This is not the first time that the government has touted such low figures for identifying poverty. The latest figures are, in fact, an improvement from earlier estimates. Experts said the government has in the past used lower population levels (through old estimates and census data) to keep the number of the ‘officially poor’ low.
