The right way to count India’s poor

A task force I chaired in the 1970s had identified the poor by person-per-day (ppd) calorie requirements, depending on region (rural or urban), occupation, age group, sex and working status. We were living from hand-to-mouth those days (or from ship to mouth) and Indira Gandhi’s orders were clear: we must produce our own food.

By the 1980s, the world had changed. When I went back to the Planning Commission in the 1980s, I argued that the Official Poverty Line (OPL) or the Alagh Poverty Line (APL) was out of date. The Lakdawala Committee was set up, but DT Lakdawala passed away and the OPL/APL approach continued.

Suresh Tendulkar made matters worse by applying the OPL/APL urban line for both urban and rural areas. The requirements of the aam aadmi remained to be defined. I was happy when a group was set up under Arvind Panagriya to do that.

Meanwhile, C Rangarajan and S Mahendra Dev have gone back and argued that that India’s poor are closely bunched around calorie determined poverty line. They make an interesting argument on nutritional deprivation, but the larger question of the nature of deprivation is probably complex, and understanding that complexity is important for policy formulation.

As the FAO’s work has shown over decades, distributions of population by calories are somewhat narrow, compared to other indicators. Typically, if the modal or average level of calorie intake is, say, 1,800 ppd (per person per day), it is extremely likely that around a third of the population will be consuming around 200 calories ppd less than the average and another third 200 calories ppd more.

So around three-fifths of the population would be consuming 1,600-2,000 calories ppd. This sort of range could be much wider if one looks at housing, educational opportunities or even clothing. In other words, the ‘bunching’ may not be that narrow.

When the Rangarajan Group on poverty was set up, the Centre announced that “the various committees in the past including the Alagh Committee (1977), the Lakdawala Committee (1989) followed by the Tendulkar Committee (2005), arrived at estimates based upon certain indices of poverty from time to time.

The Technical Group to be constituted would have the benefit of SECC, 2011 data, based upon a comprehensive census which would enable the government to purposively revisit poverty estimates and identify the poor.” Poverty estimation was, therefore, supposed to move away from calorie distributions.

Scholars such as R Radhakrishna came out with devastating findings on deprivation levels in specific age groups and sections of the population like women. A number of interesting efforts have been made at the State level to develop online identification of poor households in States such as Gujarat, Kerala and others.

The NC Saxena Committee in 2009 for identifying beneficiaries through the Poverty Line Census had interesting proposals for giving deprivation points and weights to different sections of the population in defining poverty. Deprivation points were used in the admission system for JNU.

As its VC, we placed resources with the Student’s Union for an extensive debate to develop a workable system of deprivation in an appropriate form in a debate for admission reform, in addition to SC/ST reservations.

In early discussions it was agreed that the system must actually serve its objectives and not permit cheating.

A system of deprivation points was designed. Points were given on the basis of the location of the college of the last degree, advantage given to those who graduate from the poorest quarter of districts in India, sex, and BPL status.

The Rangarajan Group also recommended that the beneficiaries under target group oriented schemes of the government may be selected from the deprivation-specific ranking of households. These issues are now in cold storage.

It is the poverty ratio at the State level which remains the problem, and that was used for inter-State resource allocation. A consensus needs to evolve on what the aam aadmi needs. A multiple indicators approach would be helpful.

The writer is the chancellor of Central University of Gujarat and a former Union minister

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