What is poverty?
Poverty is simply a state of deprivation where an individual is unable to fulfill his most basic needs of food, shelter or clothing. However, poverty is always a relative concept and not an absolute one, since a person with a given standard of living in the US may not be poor by say, Indian standards.
Changing Meaning
Poverty has classically largely been understood on economic terms, related to income levels of an individual. However, the term is now commonly associated with deprivation of a wide range of facilities including food, water, sanitation, clothing, shelter, health care and education, and not just income levels.
Poverty Estimation in India
Committees under Planning Commission
- have been conducting studies since 1997
- 1st estimate was of number and proportion of poor
1. Lakdawala Committe
- used Uniform Recall Period of 30 days
- used the (in)famous calorie intake method
- 2400 calories as poverty line for rural areas (since people in rural areas do more physical work)
- 2100 calories for people in urban areas
2. Tendulkar Committee (2005)
- recommended moving away from Calorie Intake method
- Used a Mixed Recall period
- Here mixed recall period means that people were asked to recall consumption for 2 periods
- people were asked what they consumed in last 30 days for food items
- 365 day period was used for non-food item
Comparison of findings of Tendulkar Committe vs. Lakdawala Committee
Of course, the ministers in govt wanted to look like as if they work too, and its not just the Planning Commission which has taken upon itself to eradicate poverty in India.
- to review the methodology for conducting BPL Census in rural areas
- it recommended doing away with the score based ranking of rural households used then
- gave the famous methodology of automatic inclusion and automatic exclusion
- as far as I remember , it said poor in India are as high as 50%
- this is natural since more poor = more funds for rural development = happy minister
- this estimate is a bone of contention between Planning Commission and MoRD.
- even states cite this report to say that we’re more poor than PC thinks, and give us more funds
- PC says, this is erroneous, and we dont have so much money to feed so many poor people.
What about Urban Poverty?
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