(Ashok Malik is a columnist and writer living in Delhi)Debates about the poverty line often end up being a cruel and insensitive process of accounting, at least in India. However well-meaning, the report of the C. Rangarajan Committee, arguing that 363 million Indians - 29.6 per cent of the population - are living in poverty, cannot be divorced from that context. The Rangarajan Committee, set up by the UPA government, has put Rs. 32 (rural) and Rs. 47 (urban) as acceptable per capita expenditure levels to define poverty.
While it will be up to the NDA government to either accept or reject the Rangarajan Committee report, the background to the findings represents the strange and sometimes paradoxical predicament the previous UPA government found itself in when it came to the issue of poverty.
At one level, the left-wing clique that surrounded Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, and dominated the National Advisory Council, was determined to prove the NDA years had been a failure, that the market and economic reform, deregulation and liberalisation were useless, and that India remained desperately poor.
At another level, sections of the government - particularly then finance minister P. Chidambaram and then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh - were keen to restrict the volume of the population classified as poor so as to limit the recipients of the gargantuan welfare and populism programmes that had been forced upon them by Sonia Gandhi.
At a third level, the Congress as a party was keen to take PR and electoral advantage of the reduction in poverty and present it as a result of economic growth and/or welfarism in the UPA years. In short, it had to admit poverty was declining and India was no longer as poor as it had been. The consequences actually worried the party and left it with an existential crisis. As one minister from those years told this writer, "The rule of thumb is the poorer you are in India, the more likely you are to vote for the Congress."
This confusion was reflected in wildly diverging statistics. In 2007, the Arjun Sengupta Committee Report on the Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihood in the Unorganised Sector said 77 per cent of Indians lived in poverty. Using government data for the decade from 1993-94 to 2004-05, Sengupta reported 836 million Indians lived on a per capita expenditure of less than Rs 20 a day.
An antidote to this, if that word is advisable, was the Report of the Expert Group to Review the Methodology for Estimation of Poverty. Headed by the economist Suresh Tendulkar, this Expert Group submitted its report in 2009 and said 269.8 million Indians (21.9 per cent of the population) lived in poverty. The Rangarajan Committee has now used different - higher - consumption standards and expenditure figures - to measure an acceptable poverty line. In doing so, it has added another 93 million people to those Indians who should be seen as poor.
As can be imagined, no debate on poverty is going to please everybody. Should income be the criterion or, as is now the case, expenditure and consumption? If it is expenditure, is it expenditure for consumption of just food (measured in calorific values) or shelter, healthcare and education as well? Is Rs. 47 going to fetch you the same in Delhi as in Jabalpur, both of which are urban locations? The answer is obviously "no"; so in that case does a national poverty line matter at all?
Should state and district figures be trusted? How reliable are state and district and panchayat-level statistics, which may be dependent on local capacity, subjectivity, and political and personal likes and dislikes that may or may not result in, for example, the head of a panchayat reporting a family as poor and in need of targeted help?
These questions and conundrums, along with the Rangarajan report, are now for the NDA government to deal with. However, three caveats need to be entered.
First, any poverty line - whatever its basis, consumption or income or a mix - essentially tells us the basic minimum needed to just survive. This is very different from a dignified and healthy existence or what we quaintly call lower middle-class living. As such, bringing every Indian above whatever poverty line we agree on will be a useful start - but will not end the fight against say malnutrition as opposed to hunger. Life on the poverty line is better than life below the poverty line, but not by much.
Second, welfare programmes - with or without the Rangarajan Committee's incremental 93 million - have to come with a sunset clause or at least the understanding of a sunset clause. They need to be linked to skill building, capacity enhancement and asset creation. This can't happen overnight; unskilled labourers cannot suddenly build highways. Yet, a paradigm change is necessary if anti-poverty spending and productive use of human and financial capital are to be seen as a continuum. The Congress was unwilling to do this. Modi holds out promise but will need to deliver.
Third, there may be many solutions and alternative strategies to poverty but all of them require one essential, non-negotiable ingredient: robust, sustained GDP growth. That is why, important as the Rangarajan Committee report is, Arun Jaitley's Budget speech of July 10 is that much more important.
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