36 crore Indians still very poor
Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia on Saturday said that the annual rate of decline in poverty between 1993-94 and 2004-2005 was 0.74 per cent per year. Since 2004, it has been declining at 1.5 percentage points per year, which is double the rate, he explained.
“We are not saying that poverty has been eliminated or abolished. We are saying that poverty has gone down from 37.2 per cent in 2004 according to the Tendulkar report to 30 per cent in 2009-10. There are 360 million people who are still very, very poor,” he said. “This is the most important statistical finding of the Suresh Tendulkar Committee and I am staking my professional reputation on it. Before the Tendulkar Committee, the poverty line was based on the Lakdhawala Comm-ittee,” he added.
Taking a dig at experts and a section of the media for distorting facts, he said, “If you can find somebody who will say this is wrong, only then you should have a debate on it.” “It shows that the strategy of inclusive growth that we have been following is actually working. We have a faster growth rate...we had faster growth in agriculture, which is 3.5 per cent compared to 2 per cent previous year; the MGNREGA has raised wages and agriculture productivity is growing,” he further said.
He also pointed out that the concern expressed through a PIL in the Supreme Court by a Right to Food activist that if the food benefits were limited, many BPL people would be excluded was not true. . “The purpose of the poverty line is not to say who should benefit. You can give more benefits. In the Food Security Act we have said 46 per cent. They are now being called the priority sector. We are not calling them BPL. We need a poverty line to gauge the standards of living,” he asserted.
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