Montek Singh Ahluwalia’s fantasy

As someone on Twitter suggested, members of the planning commission should be given Rs587 a month and asked to live in an Indian city. I would go a step further and invite them to Mumbai.

Apparently, according to the planning commission, you can rent accommodation in an Indian city for Rs31 a month. You can also buy footwear for Rs6 (a plastic bag from the garbage perhaps) and if you eat more than two and a half bananas (since at Rs8.20 that’s all the fresh fruit you are entitled to) a month, you are obviously swimming in disposable income. I cannot speak with authority about other cities, but I can guarantee that in Mumbai, even living on the pavement will cost more than Rs31 a month, by the time you factor in haftas to the local goonda, havaldar, and so on.

The planning commission is trying to work out the poverty line and has decided that India needs less poor people. The easiest way to do this is to change the goalposts — obviously. It used to be taken at about less than a dollar a day — roughly Rs50 — but now, as inflation rates are rising, the figure stands at Rs20 a day in cities and Rs15 a day in villages if you are to be considered poor and thus entitled to whatever meagre benefits the government of India sees fit to dole out.

An average slum dweller in Mumbai’s western suburbs pays about Rs25,000 as deposit and about Rs2,500 a month as rent. Rs31 a month is unlikely to get you slum accommodation anywhere within Mumbai’s limits. A generous Rs70.80 has been factored in by the commission as monthly fuel cost, but since the minimum bus fare is about Rs4 that means you can make about 17 journeys in all — but of course, since you are poor that’s probably all that you deserve. A person who travels by bus everyday and can even wear chappals is clearly in some high income category.

Obviously, we need some criteria by which to count the country’s poor — estimates are between 270 million and 300 million, which is a third of our population. What we need from our expert economists and planners are ways in which to best allocate our resources so that we can drastically improve those terrible figures. Instead what we are getting is a deliberate attempt to equate poverty with starvation and destitution and the use of some kind of statistical trickery to reduce the numbers of poor people.

It won’t work if only because no one in India is stupid enough to buy it. Even those callous people who figure in our middle classes and begrudge paying their servants’ salaries know how much it costs to survive in a city like Mumbai. But this reality has perhaps passed our planning commission by. There are some pavements still available in the city. Would Montek Singh Ahluwalia like to live on the wild side?