A new line

This column has been arguing that the 1977 poverty line, prepared by a task force I had chaired...

This column has been arguing that the 1977 poverty line, prepared by a task force I had chaired, which set down a calorific intake standard made sense when more than two-fifths of the population reported that they did not get two square meals a day,nbsp;but is a travesty now. As plan panel members, we set up a task force under Professor D.T. Lakdawala in 1989 to examine this but he passed away and the expert group8217;s report in his name only went into statistical questions of updating the calorific poverty line. We argued that the debate around the 1973-74 poverty line amongst economists is not very relevant to an India which is not living from ship to mouth, where hunger is much less, literacy and awareness are much higher and the future is much richer and younger, although not necessarily more equal or caring. Fortunately, both the compulsion of democratic politics and the pressing needs of practitioners are leading to a search for alternatives; I argued that we should follow these trends, junk the poverty line of which I was the author, and operationalise a working vision of a desirable future for the aam aadmi. The junking has been done. The operationalisation must now follow.nbsp;

The critique one sees in the media and from some experts, that India8217;s earlier poverty line ignored prices and the markets, is wrong. It was developed in the context of market behaviour of the rich and the poor in rural and urban areas separately. It showed that income supplementation and public distribution policies working through pricing and dual markets an open market and a rationing system could be integrated quantitatively into the commodity market and parastatal policies specifically aimed at households below the poverty line. The price elasticities ofnbsp;rich and poor Indians in rural and urban areas attracted Lakadawala immensely for price theory, common sense and a concern for the poor were his forte up to the last day of his life. But the problem lay elsewhere. The line was out of synch with aspirations. nbsp;

Events have, however, overtaken controversies about the statistics of poverty. Policy-makers found it impossible to work with odd results, such as those suggesting that urban poverty is more than that in rural areas or that poverty in advanced regions is more than that in poor regions.nbsp;The Planning Commission8217;s in-house work, as well as other studies, has shown that poverty estimates are very sensitive to price data variation and this feature led to unusable results at state levels. The Department of Rural Development undertook independent studies of Below Poverty Line populations. A number of interesting efforts have been made at the state level to develop online identification of poor households in states like Kerala and others. Scholars like R. Radhakrishna came out with devastating findings on deprivation levels among specific age groups and in sections of the population, like women and girls.nbsp;

These efforts were a commendable beginning and have now been endorsed by the Planning Commission. The policy was reportedly announced by K.L. Datta, one of the best men we have in the field, who with his young bride 8212; then another economics service officer 8212; had done a lot of the work for the 1977 poverty line. But this is a combative, contentious culture and I have always argued that this exercise needs validation at a national level. The indicators have to emerge from a goals exercise, which needs national-level cogitation, fighting and validation. These goals then need relationships with instruments and programmes. Finally, there has to be a matching with scarcities not only of available resources, but also of the more basic non-renewable kind, as well as delivery capabilities. Otherwise, the statistical exercises will remain sporadic acts of activism. Some might also attribute motives to them.nbsp;

The exercise will have to unequivocally define the rights of sections of the pop ulation. There will have to be a much greater emphasis on the rights of individuals and groups, including participatory forms of decision-making. These are not just questions of resource use, but also of governance, and in fact will be resource-conserving if well designed and implemented. Systems will demand greater fairness and self-restraint in the use of government power. Related will be demands on transparency and the right to information. There will have to be a response to the demand for protecting vulnerable groups, either the historically underprivileged, or the victims of marketisation; concerns for human rights and particularly of specific groups such as women, children, the minorities, the adivasis, the mentally and physically challenged. The experience since 1991 is that reform by stealth fails in substantial measure. Recognising that, it is required that we articulate the space of different sections of our people in a definable and contestable manner in the design of reform. Statistics, like so many other parts of government policy, will have to be redesigned by a new generation to meet the needs of today.

The writer, a former Union minister, is chairman, Institute of Rural Management, Anand

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