NEW DELHI, SEPTEMBER 28: India's poverty numbers may have gone down significantly but the per capita availability of foodgrains has gone down dramatically. Agricultural growth is quite healthy, but public investment continues to fall. Expenditure on anti-poverty and employment generation continues to increase, but a mere 15 per cent of the beneficiaries of the massive Rs 13,700 crore-IRDP anti-poverty programme crossed over the poverty line since the programme begun in the 1980s.Food subsidies have gone up four times this decade, but a third of wheat and rice get diverted at a national level - this goes up to a whopping 69 per cent in Punjab and a curious 100 per cent in Nagaland.Welcome to India circa now. These horrifying numbers, believe it or not, form the core of the mid-term review of the 9th plan (1997 to 2002) that's just been completed by the Planning Commission, and is to be formally released once Prime Minister Vajpayee's had a chance to go through it - that's expected later this week or early next week.What's especially disturbing, according to the mid-term review, is that the core of India's GDP - which decides whether the economy will grow at 5 or 7 per cent - is in terrible shape. Public investment in agriculture has remained static for the last 5 years and foodgrain production which grew by 37 per cent in the '80s, increased by a mere 12 per cent during the last 9 years. In fact the Planning Commission has stated that if the target of agricultural growth have to be achieved in the current Plan, agriculture will have to grow at 15 per cent over the next two years.And this despite the fact that investments in the agriculture sector are down from 19 per cent in the early eighties to 9.4 per cent now.The annual average growth rates of foodgrain production are down to 1.8 per cent in the 1990s compared with 3.5 per cent in the 80s. For non-foodgrains too, the situation is not much better - down at 3.2 per cent now from 4.02 per cent in 1980s. Even milk production is down from 5.4 per cent during the 80s to 4.8 per cent in the 90s.If this isn't bad enough, coupled with the sharp increase in inter-state inequality over the last decade, per capita daily availability of foodgrains has declined from 490 grams in 1990 to a little over 469 in 1998. Worse, cereal consumption of the bottom 40 per cent of the population fell from 12.10 kg in 1993-94 to 11.75 kg in 1997. In sharp contrast, the top 10 per cent of the population has an average consumption of 16.5 kg per capita, 33 per cent more than the poor people's consumption of foodgrains.The mid-term appraisal puts the growth in the first three years of the Ninth Five Year Plan (1997-2002) at 6.1 per cent. It has also stated that if the target average growth rate of 6.5 per cent has to be achieved, the GDP would have to grow at 7.1 per cent annually over the next two years of the Plan.The financial health of the economy also has several pressures pulling it down. Even as tax collections are Rs 74,225 crore short of the targets, the pesion bill (for 15 states) has mounted from less that Rs 4,000 crore in 1990-91, to nearly Rs 18,000 crore in 1998-99.
