The New Definition of Poor

The definition of poor in India is getting ridiculous and callous as well. If the new report on poor from Planning Commission of India is to be believed, only one thought comes to mind as how clueless and naive are the executives Yojana Bhavan who could eventually conclude that the number of poor people in India had declined by 7.3 percent between 2004 and 2009. Was it a deliberate window dressing exercise to showcase our hidden vulnerability as a transformed success story and get some pats from World Bank and IMF? Or was it a serious nexus between the top bosses of Yojana Bhavan and capitalist coterie to ignore the dark underbelly of economic condition of India? Whatever be the reason the report published by Planning Commission only reveals that how irrational are the members of Planning Commission including the big boss Montek Singh Ahluwalia who unabashedly claim that the methods used in deriving this results are sacrosanct and scientific.

Now get down to the brasstacks. The report suggests that the people who are spending Rs 22.43 in rural areas and Rs 28.65 in urban areas per day are not poor. How fraudulent and dishonest these people who define the rock bottom living standard of a human being is an outcome of minimum calorie intake per day by an adult, rather than considering multi-dimensional socio-economic parameters? What about shelter, clothing, medicines, and education? Are these poor people forced to live a life of an animal without dignity? Given a chance to these members of Planning Commission to survive on the threshold spending limit defined by them will only make them realize that academic calculation or armchair policy making is quite easier than understanding what's happening on ground zero.

Reducing the number of poor people in statistical terms is not an achievement, but a sheer reflection of collective ignorance of Planning Commission. Despite many poverty alleviation programs launched by Government of India, the real poverty is still not mitigated because all these programs were easy means to amass wealth by ministers and bureaucrats. Whatever funds got transferred to states, through various programs, it won't be too rhetoric to express as if an elephant transported was finally transformed to its tail when landed at the hand of beneficiaries. That is the ground reality of Indian poverty alleviation program. More such programs, more conduits of corruption; the poor gets poorer and the rich richer.