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| Photo Source: INQUIRER.net |
Poverty
in India is believed to be widespread, and defining poverty and identifying
poor has always been India’s persistent challenge. The concerns around the
definitional clarity of the poverty and Below Poverty Line (BPL) has been well
acknowledged decades back by the prominent visionaries of our nation like
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Dadabhai Naoroji and later by the policy making
institutions like Planning Commission.
National Planning Committee under Pandit Nehru recognised the prevailing poverty and thus made an effort in
1936 with a policy objective to “ensure an adequate standard of living
for the masses, to get rid of the appalling poverty of the people”. Towards
this end, the Committee defined goals for the total population in terms of
nutrition (involving a balanced diet of 2400 to 2800 calories per
adult worker), clothing (30 yards per capita per annum) and housing (100
sq. ft per capita).
However, even after realising and accepting the concerns for so long, an inconsistency has been recognised
between the conceptual level of understanding and the practical ways of
estimating poverty and the identification of poor households. At conceptual level, definition of poverty is involved
both in the estimation of proportion of population living in poverty (a macro
level estimate) and the identification of poor households for targeted delivery of various
poverty alleviation programmes. In practice, however, the two approaches have
followed different paths. The overall estimation of poverty is based on the
data available from NSSO’s (National
Sample Survey Office) all-India sample survey of household consumption expenditure, whereas identification
of poor households requires a census, which necessarily goes by visible and
quickly assessable indicators of level of living. Though the poverty ratio majorly
depicted the falling trend in both rural and urban India from 1973-74 to
2009-10, the total population under poverty in both rural and urban areas kept
on increasing (from 321.3 million to 354.68 million) throughout the same period,
as per the Planning commission data.
Though, it is well accepted that till India’s economic liberalisation policy, poverty
was an instrument to ensure basic necessities like food, but in the post
liberalisation phase with greater accessibility, the idea of poverty gradually underwent
changes. Much later in the year 1999-2000, NSSO introduced a method
of Mixed Reference Period (MRP) measuring consumption of five low-frequency
items (clothing, footwear, durables, education and institutional health
expenditure) over the previous year (365 days recall period), and all other items
over the previous 30 days, in order to get a stable expenditure pattern for
non-food items. A poor himself defines his
poverty more
broadly by
including lack of education, health, housing, empowerment, humiliation,
employment, personal security and more. Thus
considering the relevance of the factors, other than income taken into account
even by a poor person to define their poverty, it
becomes even more significant to capture the housing conditions, work profile
and other indicators of social and economic status of the households, in order
to rightly benefit the vulnerable & needful masses of the country. A
study by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative using a
Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MPI) found that there were 650 million people
(53.7% of population) living in poverty in India.
In regard to the concerns raised
related to the identification of the households and the relevance of the
factors other than income contributing to poverty, the Socio
Economic and Caste Census (SECC) was launched on 29th June 2011 in the country.
It is being carried out by the respective State/Union Territory Governments
with the financial and technical support of the Government of India for the
identification of BPL households in both rural and urban areas and would generate information on
housing conditions, work profile and other indicators of social and economic
status of the households in both the areas. This data could be used to identify
the vulnerable or poor households. The census comprises of exclusion, inclusion
and deprivation criteria approved by the Cabinet.
Thus it is being realised over
the period of time at policy level that the process of inclusion and benefiting the masses with the poverty
alleviation programme could be a possible solution since, the evolution in
the methodology of BPL census has resulted in reducing the margin for
inclusion/ exclusion significantly. Despite such drastic moves, there still
remains continuous attempt amongst Indian policy makers to look for an ideal
definition of poverty.
Recently the Rangrajan Committee (formed by
Planning Commission in 2012 to review the existing methodology of estimating
poverty and expected to submit their report by 2014) was formed to redefine
poverty and examine Tendulkar methodology. The report is expected to give a new
definition of poverty and based on that country will re-estimate the number of
people below the poverty line.
-Shruti Issar
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