India’s opposition parties yesterday accused the government of fudging the country’s poverty levels after it declared that those earning Rs 22 (33 cent) per day in rural areas and Rs 28 (42 cent) in cities were not poor.
The government’s rationale is that those earning these sums were able to ensure a daily intake of around 1,200 calories, essential for survival, and hence were above the poverty line, according to the federal Planning Commission’s figures.
These earnings indicated a “substantial” decline in the number of poor people in India in 2009-10 to about 360 million – more than the US’s entire population – down from 407.2 million five years earlier, says the commission. “I don’t know which line they [the government] are drawing.
Whether it is the starvation line or the poverty line,” said SS Ahluwalia of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
It is beyond the imagination of the prime minister and the planning commission to know how a person can survive on such a low income, he added.
