Poverty Estimates in India Explained

AyushSinha

I am pasting below the structure of the Committees. Hope you find it useful. A small thanks will be appreciated. Beer would also do :P

AyushSinha

AyushSinha

Committees under Planning Commission

• have been conducting studies since 1997
• 1st estimate was of number and proportion of poor

1. Lakdawala Committe

• used Uniform Recall Period of 30 days
• used the (in)famous calorie intake method
• 2400 calories as poverty line for rural areas (since people in rural areas do more physical work)
• 2100 calories for people in urban areas

AyushSinha

2. Tendulkar Committee (2005)

• recommended moving away from Calorie Intake method
• Used a Mixed Recall period
• Here mixed recall period means that people were asked to recall consumption for 2 periods
• people were asked what they consumed in last 30 days for food items
• 365 day period was used for non-food item

AyushSinha

Comparison of findings of Tendulkar Committe vs. Lakdawala Committee 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

||    Committee               ||         Rural            ||       Urban      ||       Total        ||

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

||   Lakdawala(URP)     ||         28%              ||        25%        ||        27.5%    ||

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

||   Tendulkar (MRP)     ||         41%              ||        25%        ||        37.2%    ||

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

AyushSinha

Of course, the ministers in govt wanted to look like as if they work too, and its not just the Planning Commission which has taken upon itself to eradicate poverty in India.

So, the Ministry of Rural development Ministry , hurriedly set up a committee known as the SAXENA COMMITTEE , in 2009.

• to review the methodology for conducting BPL Census in rural areas
• it recommended doing away with the score based ranking of rural households used then
• gave the famous methodology of automatic inclusion and automatic exclusion
• as far as I remember , it said poor in India are as high as 50%
• this is natural since more poor = more funds for rural development = happy minister
• this estimate is a bone of contention between Planning Commission and MoRD.
• even states cite this report to say that we're more poor than PC thinks, and give us more funds
• PC says, this is erroneous, and we dont have so much money to feed so many poor people.

AyushSinha

What about Urban Poverty?

The folks at Niramn Bhavan ( निर्माण भवन  ) also have set up a committee known as the S R Hashim Committee

But What will this committee do?

This will study the methodology for estimating BPL families in Urban Areas.

 निर्माण भवन = Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation

योजना भवन = the office of Planning Commission

Ziel

 A small thanks will be appreciated.

your wish is our command like the diagram

robinolds

Nice man, Thanx !

valkyrie724

I guesa if u wanna know a little about this u can refer to economic survey. I guess this all is given in chaptet 12 of wco survey of last year. For update go through new one. Both hashim gupta committee and saxena is given there in detail.

TD_1989

what's the currently used poverty estimation technique? tendulkarji or saxenaji???