In April, India's Planning Commission accepted recommendations put forth by the so-called Tendulkar Committee on a new poverty headcount for the country. Constituted by the Planning Commission under economist Suresh D Tendulkar, the committee, after four years and a new methodology, arrived at a new figure for the number of Indians living below the poverty line: 37.2 percent, ten points higher than the previous official figure. With the government's subsequent official acceptance of the recommendations, these numbers now translate to roughly 407 million people, compared to the earlier number of 297 million, living on around USD 1.15 per day.
The Tendulkar numbers are the latest addition to the longstanding debate in India over how 'poverty' should be defined. This includes the practical difficulties involved in assigning a number to it, but also the linking of that number to critical policy issues, such as government welfare schemes – and, of course, the implications of globalisation, neoliberalism and India's economic reforms post-1991. While over the past two decades India has seen growth rates of gross domestic product (GDP) that were high by historical standards, their impact on overall deprivation remain highly contested. Officially, poverty numbers showed a decline from 36 percent of the population in 1993-94 to around 27 percent in 2004-05. But those numbers have been fiercely contested, with economists from all corners wading into the statistical rat's nest to try to prove that the figures suggested either too much or too little reduction in poverty.
Poverty calculations in India have been both pioneering and controversial. In 1971, economists V M Dandekar and Nilkantha Rath suggested a nutrition-based norm for calculating a poverty line, arriving at the figure of 2250 calories as the minimum daily requirement for the average Indian. Eight years later, a Planning Commission taskforce tweaked this a bit, to set the norms at 2400 calories for rural areas and 2100 for urban areas. But over time it was observed that the stipulated calorie norms were not being met at the official poverty lines, a fact formally noted in 1991 by the economist Rohini Nayyar.
110 million more
Eventually there emerged something of a consensus among non-government economists that the figure of 27 percent underestimated real poverty levels – though by how much, no one really knew. There were other glaring discrepancies in the official poverty numbers, too. In 1979, the Planning Commission defined the poverty line as the per capita expenditure with which a person could afford to consume a minimum number of calories per day. Based on 1973-74 consumption patterns, as reported by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), the money deemed necessary was fixed at INR 49 rupees (rural) and INR 57 (urban) per month. Since, then the poverty line(s) have merely been adjusted for inflation. Thus, in 2004-05, the rural/urban poverty lines were INR 538/356 rupees per month, making for a ridiculously low figure of INR 11.86 per day for rural areas – more of a 'destitution' line. Independent surveys have likewise indicated that poverty levels are higher than those fixed using NSSO data.