You must link poverty line to nutrition, says Tendulkar committee dissenter

In what has been a week of debate, set off by the Planning Commission’s release of poverty reduction numbers, Raghav Gaiha writes in Outlook magazine that the Tendulkar Committee glossed over the the linkage between poverty and nutrition. He writes, “The delinking of the poverty cutoff and calorie requirements is unfortunate as a consumption basket of the urban poor lacks normative significance.” Using the urban consumption basket for rural India, he says, pushes down the numbers. Gaiha, also writes that he was the dissenting  voice in the Tendulkar Committee, whose dissent wasn’t published. This is part of a larger cover story The lines we cross , that covers the debate around poverty. Gaiha, goes on to add that a slight increase in the poverty cutoff would cause an ’enormous increase in numbers’. [caption id=“attachment_97012” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] The politics of poverty has played out this week. Reuters[/caption] Firstpost’s Dhiraj Nayyar had argued earlier this week: “The Government is desperate. How else would you explain the Planning Commission peddling poverty statistics that are borne out of a methodology that was rejected by the very same institution only last year. It is plain dishonest to claim that only 22 percent of India now lives below the poverty (compared to 39 percent in 2004) line, when the poverty line threshold of an approximate per capita daily consumption worth Rs 33 per day has been confined to the dustbin.” Vivek Kaul had also explained the link between nutrition, poverty and planned expenditure in this smart piece , where he also signaled the problems of pushing up a poverty line: “Lets understand this through an example. Let us say there are 100 people. Of this 20 are deemed to be poor. The government decides to spend Rs 100 to help them. Hence, on an average each one of them benefits to the extent of Rs 5. Now let’s say the definition of poverty is changed and 90 out of 100 people, are deemed to be poor. The government still spends Rs 100 on them. The benefit per person comes down to a much lower Rs 1.11 (Rs 100/90). Hence, the more poor lose out at the cost of the less poor.” Politics has added more fuel to the raging economists debate, with both Kapil Sibal and Digvijaya Singh speaking out against the Planning Commission’s calculation of poverty.