Calorie intake criterion puts 50 per cent Indians below poverty line

September 20: 2009: The Hindu

Bangalore: An expert committee, set up by the Rural Development Ministry and headed by N.C. Saxena, says 50 per cent of Indians are Below the Poverty Line if one takes into account the criterion of calorie intake.

This nearly doubles the BPL numbers, when the Planning Commission has said only 28.3 per cent of the population is BPL. If accepted, this will bring a much larger number of the poor under the system of food subsidy.

The report, now circulated to States for comments before undertaking a BPL survey, makes a stark indictment of the existing food subsidy system. “The number of food deficit people is at least double the number officially declared poor in India. Thus there is every case for enlarging the category of those entitled to cheaper food from the government,¶ it says.

The report demonstrates that there has been a steady decline in the calorie intake, especially cereal consumption, among the poor between 1972-73 and 1999-2000. Ironically this has happened even as the number of people officially declared poor has steadily gone down over the same years.

The report maps “gross errors of exclusion and inclusion¶ that have crept into the system because of the flawed methodology of BPL identification, and argues that “errors of inclusion are far better than the errors of exclusions which often crop up in the backward districts as the poor people, especially tribals, have little voice or influence over the administration.¶ It says that 61 per cent of households, poor on account of their consumption expenditure being less than the official poverty line, have been excluded from the net of BPL census.

It recommends a new methodology of score-based ranking, besides recommending parameters for “automatic inclusion¶ and “automatic exclusion¶ for some categories of households.