Thursday, January 3, 2013

India has you as our Prime Minister

Mr. Prime Minister, congratulations! We, the 456 million paupers (living below the miserable poverty line, for information), feel delighted that 62 years after Independence, India has you as our Prime Minister, for a second term...

So what should the actual parameter be for deciding who in God’s name is below the poverty line? Angela Gibson-Kierstead, Chief Economist, the Canadian Council on Social Development, spoke to us, “As far as the calorie-intake method is concern, it is so adrift of people’s own perception of poverty, which is more based on asset ownership. Imagine a ‘not poor’ person who has had his quota of calories but still doesn’t have a roof on his head...” William R. Cline, Senior economist, Center for Global Development, commented, “There cannot be a single approach to calculate poverty threshold. For example, the $2 limit might work properly in a developing society but fails miserably in developed countries. Similarly, in North Africa and West Asia, the calorie calculation method falls flat because of eating habits...”

Not that the government is blind to the per capita income format. The National Commission for Enterprises in Unorganised Sector, commissoned by the UPA government – with Arjun Sengupta as Chairman – had presented its findings on poverty to our Prime Minister Mr.Manmohan Singh just a handful of years back. The two major findings were not that dissimilar to the World Bank report:
(a) Over 395 million workers (more than 85% of the working population and 78% of the unorganised workforce) live at an income that is Rs. 20 of less a day.
(b) 88% of SCs and STs, 80% of OBCs and 85% of Muslims belong to the “poor and vulnerable” category, again earning less than Rs. 20 a day. And these figures represent current times. In 1990, China had more than 60% of its population living below the poverty line. In 2015, this figure will be below 6%, as per World Bank estimates. There obviously is something that the supremely dictatorial China is doing that our brilliantly intellectual and pathetically democratic MPs and PMs seem to be not doing, and that too despite poverty ostensibly being the number one policy issue for every government since Independence till date.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
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