Poverty down to 29.8%, says plan panel

Has poverty declined during UPA’s regime? In what may seem a pat on the central government’s back, a set of figures released by the planning commission on Monday claimed that number of poor has come down by around 7.3% to 29.8% of the nearly 1.2 billion population from 2004-05 to 2009-10.

The plan panel data states poverty in rural areas declined at a faster pace than in urban areas between 2004-05 and 2009-10. But report was silent on the question that if the reason behind this was UPA’s flagship MNREGA scheme.

As against 40.72 crore in 2004-05, the total number of poor in the country has been estimated at 34.47 crore in 2009-10.

“People can say that the per capita expenditure amount used to arrive at the poverty numbers is very low, but that's the reality, poverty line figure is very low in our country. However, if the government wants to increase it, by say, 10%, we can do that in future”, said deputy chairman, Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia.

In September 2011, the Planning Commission received flak from the Supreme Court for filing an affidavit in which the per capita expenditure for urban poor was kept at Rs32 per day. Interestingly, the per capita threshold for calculating the poverty line in urban areas is Rs860, which comes to about Rs29 per person for a day.

Explaining decline in the per capita expenditure for determining poverty line, Abhijit Sen, member of the Planning commission said: “The Rs32 figure was based on the inflation adjustment till July 2011. Since this data is for 2009-10, the figure is less”.