Poverty decline rate doubled during UPA regime
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The real question is, has poverty decreased since then at all?
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India's GDP has increased and you think all the poor have remained poor? Even of the percentage of population below poverty remains the same it means a lot of people are coming out of poverty because the population is increasing.
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India has a historically high rate of inflation. Has rural income grown to match it, much less surpass it?
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India is chaotic and unorganized. There is no way to know the real income of anyone. At best it can be a calculated guess. Even the Indian GDP figure is far bigger than what is shown officially because there is a huge parallel economy that is not accounted for.
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"¨"¨"©The condition of graduate people is same here.It's people I'm telling you who have inherited family business are the main cause of wealthiness of the state, simply means people were wealthier,state's economy wasn't booming like now.There were many unemployed people who have become graduate,too.Even literacy level was still low in some part.
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"¨"¨"©People have more money than before but they don't have that much amount that they can spend like before.Inflation,price rise are the main issue.Poverty according to definition is decreased but the situation is same.
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Like is said before, poverty can mean different status in different countries.
In the west it can be someone who cannot afford medical insurance.
In Indian context also we can have separate definitions.
One is based on PPP of $1.25 absolute poverty and $2.00 poverty.
Poverty can also be defined on the calorie intake per day.
At the end of the day poverty alleviation in India does not mean that people who didn't have food to eat are living in high rise apartment but about those who didnt have 3 meals a day, earning enough money to eat three times.
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Under UPA, I don't think poverty has improved at all. The rich get richer and the poor stay poor.
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Without definitive data, we can't say that.
Many Indians went hungry and sometimes for days on end. If they are getting 2-3 meals a day, I'd say a change has come around.
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Considering how much is spent on subsidies, it should be easy to get 2-3 meals a day if that is the benchmark for poverty... which is absurd.
A well informed article on the poverty line issue. Read carefully and digest this article by a World Bank development economist and leave prejudices aside.
Views | The great and infuriating poverty debate | Live Mint
The debate over the poverty numbers in India is oddly impoverished.
Judging from the vociferousness with which India's press and English-speaking upper-middle-classes are debating the latest poverty figures, those who chide the wealthy for a lack of concern for the poor are barking up the wrong tree. And no doubt much of the breast-beating about the "absurd" poverty cutoffs and the declines in poverty (exaggerated! inadequate!) is extremely well-intentioned. Unfortunately, the discussion is - for the large part - also grotesquely misinformed and counter-productive. Perhaps this is inevitable when the rich contemplate the lives of those who must make do with but a fraction of their resources. (At least nobody's asking the poor to eat mithai, although an article that involved a correspondent bemoaning the difficulty of making do on Rs28 a day while buying processed food and chhole-kulche from a Delhi stall came close). But it is deeply frustrating to watch such an important economic and policy issue reduced to a series of inanities.
The first popular misconception about poverty in India seems to be that the poverty line is designed to separate the poor from the comfortably off. Yet it is not, and it never has been. From its inception, the goal of the measurement of poverty in India - as indeed in most very poor countries - has been much more modest. The poverty line in India is perhaps more properly called a "starvation" or "destitution" line: it simply tries to measure how much money is needed to sustain a very basic diet that gives a person the number of calories needed to stave off hunger.
Now, one could argue that the calorie cutoff itself needs to be raised, though it is hard to see why, given that the average Indian is becoming more sedentary and even poor Indians are presumably not becoming more dependent on hard labour than they already were. (Parenthetically, I would surmise that raising the poverty cutoff to Rs40 a day would still evoke the same howls of horror, because those of us who spend Rs40 on some lukewarm coffee would still find it impossible to imagine how anyone could live on that sum for a day.) One could also argue with complete justification that meeting a calorie cutoff is not enough. Clearly, someone who is barely able to feed himself or herself is still "poor" by most reasonable standards. But none of this makes the poverty rate as it is currently calculated a useless piece of information. After all, by the government's own estimates, nearly 30% of our population falls below this admittedly low bar. This is an enormous number, and it seem perfectly valid for a government to argue that it wishes to concentrate poverty alleviation efforts on those who cannot even meet this most minimal of life's requirements. The exercise is both intellectually valid and practically useful.
Of course it also makes sense to measure how those above this line but still poor are doing. It would be extremely useful to have a better, more frequently updated numbers for the overall distribution of household income, so we also have a better grip on how different segments of our population are faring. For instance, it might be extremely useful to have a second, less stringent poverty line, perhaps at twice the level of the existing one, and to see how the number of Indians under it changes. Call it the "near-poverty line", if you will. This is the reasoning behind the World Bank having two international poverty lines, those popularly known as the dollar-a-day and the $2-a-day lines.
Which brings me to the second, astonishingly widely held misconception. This is that the government's poverty cut-off of around $0.44-a-day in rural areas is "too low" because it falls short of the World Bank's $1.25-a-day. This is just plain wrong: it may be too low (as discussed above) but it's not any lower than the Bank's. The World Bank's poverty line is in PPP dollars, and the "PPP exchange-rate" for India according to the 2011 Economic Survey was Rs15.5 =$1. This means that it cost around $0.30 to buy in India what would cost $1 in the US. Adjusting for differences in price levels, therefore, the Planning Commission's Rs22-a-day cutoff for rural areas is between $1.25-$1.50 in PPP dollars. This is entirely unsurprising since the famous dollar-a-day line was derived by noting that many developing countries' national poverty lines were clustered around that figure. It would therefore be extremely odd if India's poverty line, which was one of the ones used to get the World Bank's, were but a fraction of the international poverty line.
Then there are some who jump from arguing that the poverty line as currently and historically defined is "too low" to claiming that this means that the degree of poverty reduction claimed in official figures is exaggerated. This simply does not compute. The poverty line remains fixed in real terms. So if the number of people under it falls you have to concede that extreme poverty, measured using the (possibly too strict) benchmark the government uses, has fallen. It is perfectly possible that most of those who are no longer "officially poor" are now only just above the poverty cutoff. It is also perfectly valid to argue that this constitutes only a very weak sort of progress. But it is not valid to argue that this represents a lack of progress, or regression. This is pretty useful information - how many of our citizens are truly destitute? Are there more of them, or fewer of them, than before? If the answer is fewer, as it seems to be, then this is good news. The news is clearly not good enough, but it is good news. Saying otherwise is simply bizarre.
Finally, there is no iron-clad relationship between growth and poverty reduction. It matters where the growth comes from, what kinds of jobs (and how many) are created, and so on. It would be deeply worrying if 4 years of genuinely rapid growth and another 4 of moderately high growth- because that is really all that India, for all the hype, has had since 2000 - had not made a dent on extreme poverty, or had made it worse. Neither of those appears to be true, and it is fair to ask what could be done - in terms of both reforms and changes to government spending on the poor - to increase the effect of growth on poverty. That might just involve moving some government resources from subsidizing our water supply to using the state's redistributive might for the really poor. But that would mean that the middle-class-who-are-really-the-rich might lose some of the many benefits which we happily rely on the heartless Indian state for.
Saugato Datta is a development economist and journalist. He has been a researcher at the World Bank, an economics writer at the Economist, and is now Vice-President for international development at ideas42, a behavioral-economics research and design lab based in Boston.
Views | The great and infuriating poverty debate | Live Mint
The debate over the poverty numbers in India is oddly impoverished.
Judging from the vociferousness with which India's press and English-speaking upper-middle-classes are debating the latest poverty figures, those who chide the wealthy for a lack of concern for the poor are barking up the wrong tree. And no doubt much of the breast-beating about the "absurd" poverty cutoffs and the declines in poverty (exaggerated! inadequate!) is extremely well-intentioned. Unfortunately, the discussion is - for the large part - also grotesquely misinformed and counter-productive. Perhaps this is inevitable when the rich contemplate the lives of those who must make do with but a fraction of their resources. (At least nobody's asking the poor to eat mithai, although an article that involved a correspondent bemoaning the difficulty of making do on Rs28 a day while buying processed food and chhole-kulche from a Delhi stall came close). But it is deeply frustrating to watch such an important economic and policy issue reduced to a series of inanities.
The first popular misconception about poverty in India seems to be that the poverty line is designed to separate the poor from the comfortably off. Yet it is not, and it never has been. From its inception, the goal of the measurement of poverty in India - as indeed in most very poor countries - has been much more modest. The poverty line in India is perhaps more properly called a "starvation" or "destitution" line: it simply tries to measure how much money is needed to sustain a very basic diet that gives a person the number of calories needed to stave off hunger.
Now, one could argue that the calorie cutoff itself needs to be raised, though it is hard to see why, given that the average Indian is becoming more sedentary and even poor Indians are presumably not becoming more dependent on hard labour than they already were. (Parenthetically, I would surmise that raising the poverty cutoff to Rs40 a day would still evoke the same howls of horror, because those of us who spend Rs40 on some lukewarm coffee would still find it impossible to imagine how anyone could live on that sum for a day.) One could also argue with complete justification that meeting a calorie cutoff is not enough. Clearly, someone who is barely able to feed himself or herself is still "poor" by most reasonable standards. But none of this makes the poverty rate as it is currently calculated a useless piece of information. After all, by the government's own estimates, nearly 30% of our population falls below this admittedly low bar. This is an enormous number, and it seem perfectly valid for a government to argue that it wishes to concentrate poverty alleviation efforts on those who cannot even meet this most minimal of life's requirements. The exercise is both intellectually valid and practically useful.
Of course it also makes sense to measure how those above this line but still poor are doing. It would be extremely useful to have a better, more frequently updated numbers for the overall distribution of household income, so we also have a better grip on how different segments of our population are faring. For instance, it might be extremely useful to have a second, less stringent poverty line, perhaps at twice the level of the existing one, and to see how the number of Indians under it changes. Call it the "near-poverty line", if you will. This is the reasoning behind the World Bank having two international poverty lines, those popularly known as the dollar-a-day and the $2-a-day lines.
Which brings me to the second, astonishingly widely held misconception. This is that the government's poverty cut-off of around $0.44-a-day in rural areas is "too low" because it falls short of the World Bank's $1.25-a-day. This is just plain wrong: it may be too low (as discussed above) but it's not any lower than the Bank's. The World Bank's poverty line is in PPP dollars, and the "PPP exchange-rate" for India according to the 2011 Economic Survey was Rs15.5 =$1. This means that it cost around $0.30 to buy in India what would cost $1 in the US. Adjusting for differences in price levels, therefore, the Planning Commission's Rs22-a-day cutoff for rural areas is between $1.25-$1.50 in PPP dollars. This is entirely unsurprising since the famous dollar-a-day line was derived by noting that many developing countries' national poverty lines were clustered around that figure. It would therefore be extremely odd if India's poverty line, which was one of the ones used to get the World Bank's, were but a fraction of the international poverty line.
Then there are some who jump from arguing that the poverty line as currently and historically defined is "too low" to claiming that this means that the degree of poverty reduction claimed in official figures is exaggerated. This simply does not compute. The poverty line remains fixed in real terms. So if the number of people under it falls you have to concede that extreme poverty, measured using the (possibly too strict) benchmark the government uses, has fallen. It is perfectly possible that most of those who are no longer "officially poor" are now only just above the poverty cutoff. It is also perfectly valid to argue that this constitutes only a very weak sort of progress. But it is not valid to argue that this represents a lack of progress, or regression. This is pretty useful information - how many of our citizens are truly destitute? Are there more of them, or fewer of them, than before? If the answer is fewer, as it seems to be, then this is good news. The news is clearly not good enough, but it is good news. Saying otherwise is simply bizarre.
Finally, there is no iron-clad relationship between growth and poverty reduction. It matters where the growth comes from, what kinds of jobs (and how many) are created, and so on. It would be deeply worrying if 4 years of genuinely rapid growth and another 4 of moderately high growth- because that is really all that India, for all the hype, has had since 2000 - had not made a dent on extreme poverty, or had made it worse. Neither of those appears to be true, and it is fair to ask what could be done - in terms of both reforms and changes to government spending on the poor - to increase the effect of growth on poverty. That might just involve moving some government resources from subsidizing our water supply to using the state's redistributive might for the really poor. But that would mean that the middle-class-who-are-really-the-rich might lose some of the many benefits which we happily rely on the heartless Indian state for.
Saugato Datta is a development economist and journalist. He has been a researcher at the World Bank, an economics writer at the Economist, and is now Vice-President for international development at ideas42, a behavioral-economics research and design lab based in Boston.
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When 400 million people find it hard to get 2 square meals a day, I think it is a decent benchmark for poverty in India. Like I said, you may have different standard. For you a poor can be someone who cannot have a sumptuous meal in a 5 star restaurant once a month.
I am not sure that the correlation between NREGA implementation and poverty alleviation is real.
Maharashtra and Orissa have the best poverty alleviation figures but one of the worst NREGA implementation ones. But both states grew faster than the national average.
More data is needed on NREGA but I would prefer if the govt. created a venture capital fund to jump start poor entrepreneurs by providing them low cost finance along the Bangladeshi model of Grameen Bank.
Mohd. Yunus's book on Social capitalism is a very interesting read and these ideas have really helped poverty alleviation in BD and even in parts of India where it is implemented. Unfortunately we don't have a govt. backed program on this model which uses free markets and business to pull people out of poverty..
http://www.amazon.com/Creating-World-Without-Poverty-Capitalism/dp/1586484931
Still NREGA is better than Akhilesh's Yadav scheme of giving a free unemployment allowance for doing nothing. At least NREGA makes people WORK for dole unlike Akhilesh Yadav's scheme.
Maharashtra and Orissa have the best poverty alleviation figures but one of the worst NREGA implementation ones. But both states grew faster than the national average.
More data is needed on NREGA but I would prefer if the govt. created a venture capital fund to jump start poor entrepreneurs by providing them low cost finance along the Bangladeshi model of Grameen Bank.
Mohd. Yunus's book on Social capitalism is a very interesting read and these ideas have really helped poverty alleviation in BD and even in parts of India where it is implemented. Unfortunately we don't have a govt. backed program on this model which uses free markets and business to pull people out of poverty..
http://www.amazon.com/Creating-World-Without-Poverty-Capitalism/dp/1586484931
Still NREGA is better than Akhilesh's Yadav scheme of giving a free unemployment allowance for doing nothing. At least NREGA makes people WORK for dole unlike Akhilesh Yadav's scheme.
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Ejaz, that is pretty much what I have said in fewer words.
Then when you think about the idea of an NREGA which pays you Rs. 120 A day which is actually $2.2 a day and not in PPP terms, then you'd say it's a pretty damn good deal for those who never saw that kind of money.
Now implementation is a problem. We have the PDS for these people and some states give rice at Rs. 2 a kilo which takes care of "how anyone can survive on Rs. 28 a day that the govt says is the cut off for poverty.
The problem is that we look at it from our perspective where as the author says we spend Rs. 40 on coffee and cannot digest how someone can live on Rs. 28.
Then when you think about the idea of an NREGA which pays you Rs. 120 A day which is actually $2.2 a day and not in PPP terms, then you'd say it's a pretty damn good deal for those who never saw that kind of money.
Now implementation is a problem. We have the PDS for these people and some states give rice at Rs. 2 a kilo which takes care of "how anyone can survive on Rs. 28 a day that the govt says is the cut off for poverty.
The problem is that we look at it from our perspective where as the author says we spend Rs. 40 on coffee and cannot digest how someone can live on Rs. 28.
@Yusuf,
The poverty line estimate of Planning Commission's Rs22-a-day cutoff for rural areas is equivalent to between $1.25-$1.50 in PPP dollars. That is the World Bank definition of poverty pretty much. But our bleeding heart liberals will not understand that.
However, the NREGA is something I am not sold on despite what you said about improving delivery and removing corruption e.t.c.
My main contention is that NREGA becomes a cost center and is a program where the govt. only pays people. If you had a venture capital fund on the lines of a grameen bank, the govt. would have to hardly pay anything and may even turn a profit by helping business and entrepreneurs emerge among the poor. These will in turn create employment as part of the rural private sector.
The poverty line estimate of Planning Commission's Rs22-a-day cutoff for rural areas is equivalent to between $1.25-$1.50 in PPP dollars. That is the World Bank definition of poverty pretty much. But our bleeding heart liberals will not understand that.
However, the NREGA is something I am not sold on despite what you said about improving delivery and removing corruption e.t.c.
My main contention is that NREGA becomes a cost center and is a program where the govt. only pays people. If you had a venture capital fund on the lines of a grameen bank, the govt. would have to hardly pay anything and may even turn a profit by helping business and entrepreneurs emerge among the poor. These will in turn create employment as part of the rural private sector.
Poseidon
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Rs.28 is $ 2 in PPP terms.
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I dont think you understand the difference between employment generation and Stupid, useless welfare scheme
"this is not the first time you have defended UPA policy"
So I should oppose all UPA policies.
Read What i posted fully- This is not the first time you are supporting UPA for its non - sense aka, stupid economic policy(or be it any policy
)
