In India, there are near-constant debates about defining and measuring poverty, hunger, malnutrition and starvation. If these were merely of academic interest, this writer could pass them by in his uneducated ignorance. Any confusion could be rationalised by echoing an irreverent professor at the Delhi School of Economics, who compares statistics to a hapless and impoverished tribal man, arrested by a police inspector in a dreaded Indian police station. "If you torture both enough," the professor tells his students, "you can force them to admit to anything!"
Yet we cannot afford to ignore the sometimes complex calculations of estimating poverty and hunger levels. Especially since the 1990s in India, these calculations have been deployed by public planners and finance managers to justify cutting back public expenditures on food security, by targeting a hitherto universal public distribution system (through a country-wide network of subsidised foodgrain ration shops) at only those who are officially 'certified' to be poor. The same calculations of allegedly declining poverty and hunger are used to limit public expenditures on a range of other programmes for the poor – such as pensions for destitute old people and maternity benefits – and to minimise official acknowledgement of the adverse impacts of the policies of 'structural adjustment' programmes.
When poverty lines are fixed by politicians and administrators with one eye on political implications and another on budgetary ones, commentator Ashwani Saith has pithily surmised that this "usually leads to a squint and to cockeyed vision". In a passionate and cogent critique of poverty-line estimates, Saith has asked, "Are the poor from Mars and the rich from Venus?" Poverty and its handmaiden, inequality, he says, "are everywhere for all those with eyes to see", yet academics and policymakers "have an almost existential need to know how much of 'it' there is, and who 'they' are." In fact, they are in "every landlord's house, in each village, every five-star hotel is surrounded by them, every posh colony has its antithesis outside its gate, where the other half strives to survive … they greet you again on the pavements after a late night … you have a brush with them at traffic lights."
Overproduction or under-consumption
Most poverty lines are constructed around the severely minimalist premise of the least amount of money that an average person would require to buy the cheapest food that, when eaten, would metabolise into the minimum calories that he or she requires to lead an active and healthy life. Nutritionists the world over have experimented with many sets of people in order to construct estimates of the minimum calorie requirements of average populations. The Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) of energy has been pegged by Indian planners at 2100 kilocalories for urban and 2400 for rural people per day for 'normal' work, based on recommendations by the Nutrition Expert Group to the Planning Commission in 1968.