Plan panels poverty figures understated

CHENNAI: Over time, the Planning Commission of India, like the World Bank, has de-linked the estimation of poverty from its own definition, thereby painting a false picture of the number of people living below the poverty line, said noted economist Utsa Patnaik.Delivering the T.G Narayanan Memorial lecture organised by the Asian College of Journalism here on Friday, Patnaik said that the Planning Commission, by employing a method of poverty line calculation that de-links it from the original definition, ensures that the nutritional standard purchasable continues to decline. In other words, the standard itself is lowered and then poverty reduction is claimed, she said.Quoting data from the National Sample Survey and other official sources, she said that when the official nutrition-based norm was applied for the 2004-05 data, it was found that the actual poverty lines were almost double the official ones, with 65 per cent in urban centres and 70 per cent in rural areas unable to access minimum energy requirements through their spending. This level of poverty was strikingly higher among the SC and ST groups where it rose to 79 and 82.5 per cent respectively in the rural areas and 87.5 and 81 per cent respectively in the urban centres. She said that between 1991 and 2001, the first decade after the liberalisation regime was brought in, the per capita consumption of foodgrains had gone down by at least 25 kg to 30 kg. In this context, the figures of malnutrition among children were not surprising as the adults themselves were living in an impoverished state. Seventy five per cent of calorific energy and 75 per cent of protein come from foodgrains alone for the rural masses and a per capita reduction in foodgrain consumption will have serious impact on the state of nutrition in the country. This, she said, was a very disturbing outcome of the neo-liberal economic policies which reversed the trend of improvement in per capita foodgrain consumption that was achieved in the first 40 years after independence.