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India Says Poverty Begins Below 50 Cents a Day
September 21, 2011

People buy fish at a wholesale fish market in Kolkata. India’s poor have been specially hit hard by soaring food prices. India People buy fish at a wholesale fish market in Kolkata. India’s poor have been specially hit hard by soaring food prices. India's economic planning body has said any villager earning more than 50 cents a day is not poor and should not qualify for government welfare. (Reuters Photo/Rupak De Chowdhuri)
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New Delhi. India’s economic planning body has said any villager earning more than 50 cents a day is not poor and should not qualify for government welfare — a figure condemned by experts.

Those with a daily income of 25 rupees (50 cents) in villages and 32 rupees (65 cents) in cities should not be eligible for government assistance schemes, the Planning Commission told India’s Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Anyone earning above those levels can afford to pay for “food, education and health,” the commission said in an affidavit.

The planning body filed the submission in response to a Supreme Court request for poverty line figures to be updated in the face of near double-digit inflation. India’s poor have been specially hit hard by soaring food prices.

While India boasts a burgeoning class of urban rich thanks to a fast-growing economy, hundreds of millions of Indians face a lack of food, clean water and proper housing.

The proposed poverty line figure is far higher than the current one set at around 19 rupees per day for people in cities and 15 rupees a day in rural areas.

The World Bank global poverty line is at $1.25 a day.

India’s proposed poverty figure, which was approved by the prime minister’s office, was denounced by critics as an attempt to artificially reduce the number of poor in the country.

Prominent Indian social activist Aruna Roy said the new levels reflected “the government’s lack of empathy for the poor” and a “perspective completely divorced from reality.”

“It is obvious that this extremely low estimate is aimed at artificially reducing the number of people below the poverty line, thereby reducing government expenditure on the poor,” she told India’s DNA newspaper.

Biraj Patnaik, adviser to an official commission on the right to food, said “when it comes to helping the poor, the government wants as few people as possible to get even the minimum benefits.”

The Congress-led government has been under huge pressure to reduce its massive subsidy bill for the poor in order to reduce its gaping fiscal deficit.

The Planning Commission said some 360 million people — more than a third of the 1.2 billion population — currently receive subsidized food and cooking fuel through state-owned stores.

Agence France-Presse