India's poverty data is a decade old

For meaningful policymaking, it is important to have the right data on a steady basis. Only then can right policy be formed.

 India's poverty data is a decade old

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• The story: For meaningful policymaking, it is important to have the right data on a steady basis. Only then can right policy be formed. Sadly, India has no official, updated data on poverty for the last 10 years, with the Modi government delaying exercises to estimate poverty and scrapping the survey reports that did so.

• Estimating poverty: The standard way of estimating poverty has two steps.

1. One, the National Statistical Office or NSO (formerly National Sample Survey Organisation or NSSO) carries out a sample Consumer Expenditure Survey every five years to see how much families are spending on necessities.
2. Two, a previously set poverty line -- a set of minimum expenditure criteria -- is applied to the survey findings to determine what percentage of families qualifies as poor. This poverty line is expected to be revised every 10 to 15 years.
3. The Centre has refused to release the report of the 75th Consumer Expenditure Survey, done in 2017-18, claiming a divergence between its findings and "administrative data". The survey had found a fall in consumer spending for the first time in more than four decades.

• Net summary: The latest poverty data of India comes from the previous such survey from 2011-12, which put 21.9 per cent of the population below the poverty line. Nor has the Centre revised the old poverty line, fixed in 2005, after having rejected the recommendations of an expert committee the UPA had formed in 2012 to work out a new poverty line.

1. N.C. Saxena, a member of the UPA-era National Advisory Council (NAC), said poverty data was crucial to determining how effectively government welfare schemes were helping people improve their living standards.
2. Such data is also key to estimating where India stands in relation to other countries in the matter of poverty alleviation, and whether it can achieve the UN's Sustainable Development Goal target of eradicating poverty by 2030, to which New Delhi is a signatory.
3. Today, there's no real data on the progress towards poverty eradication. Had the NSO report been released, the poverty estimate would have come in 2019.

• Wait is on: Now everyone waits for the next NSO report. The NSO's sample household survey captures how much money a family has been spending on food, shelter, clothing, health, education, transport, entertainment and other needs.

• Poverty line: The current poverty line was fixed in 2005 by the Suresh Tendulkar committee set up by the UPA government. It suggested that a person should be considered poor if they spend less than Rs 447 a month in rural areas and Rs 578 a month in urban areas (in keeping with the 2004-05 price index).

1. Based on this, 37 per cent people -- 26 per cent in urban areas and 42 per cent in rural India -- were found to be poor in 2004-05. This improved to 21.9 per cent by 2011-12.
2. In 2012, the UPA government set up a committee under C. Rangarajan to revise the poverty line.
3. In June 2014, the committee submitted its report to the Modi government, which rejected it. In 2015, the government set up a task force under the then Niti Aayog deputy chairman, Arvind Panagariya, to recommend a fresh poverty line.
4. On February 4 this year, the minister of state for planning, Rao Inderjit Singh, told the Rajya Sabha in a written reply that the task force had not recommended any definition of poverty or a methodology to estimate poverty (poverty line) but suggested that another expert panel be set up. No such panel has been set up yet.

• Official stand: In the absence of any official poverty estimation data for the past 10 years, all the government says is that India will be able to achieve the (UN-mandated) goal on poverty; but there's no data. Tendulkar's poverty line can still be used if no new methodology is worked out.
  
  
• Given below is a World Bank information compilation from 2016. Data for 2021 would be worse than that for 2019, as pandemic has worsened the conditions severely.
  
  

 

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