Not long ago, the World Bank increased India’s poverty figures by jacking up the international (purchasing power parity-based) poverty line to $1.25 per person per day. (ADB increased it to $1.35.) So there are 456 million (41.6 per cent of population) poor people. The official Planning Commission figure continues to be 27.5 per cent of population, say 300 million people today, depending on what population figure one takes. The National Commission for Enterprises in Unorganised Sector (NCEIUS) had a figure of 237 million for poor and extremely poor. Since assumptions differ, one can’t quite match these estimates. However, they all originate with the NSS large sample of 2004-05. Hence, these figures are somewhat dated. With income and consumption growth, even if this growth is unevenly distributed across segments of the population, poverty figures must be lower today, as a ratio, if not in absolute terms. Until we have another NSS large sample, perhaps in 2009-10, we won’t quite know. For the moment, let’s assume there are around 250 million poor people, regardless of whether we are in 2004-05 or 2008. Given the present thrust of public policy, most analysis of income (or expenditure) poverty has attempted to correlate poverty with collective identities like SC/ST/OBC/religious status.

But why are we interested in such poverty numbers? Because we are driven by equity considerations and want to do something for poverty alleviation, so that growth becomes inclusive and divides and disparities are reduced. Hence, we have a fleet of anti-poverty programmes, led by so-called flagship schemes. The sub-conscious is probably at work in use of the expression “flagship”. A fleet is led by a single flagship. If there are several flagships, it is reasonable to deduce we don’t quite know what to do about poverty (beyond trickle-down effects of growth) and are therefore firing several pellets from a shotgun, in the hope that something somewhere will stick. Broadly, these anti-poverty programmes are either collective or individual. Bharat Nirman and Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana are instances of collective interventions, since they build physical or social infrastructure perceived to be public goods. In contrast, there are programmes like National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREG) or Indira Awaas Yojana, directed towards the individual poor person. They provide private goods, not public ones, but subsidise the poor. No one can question the idea of subsidising the poor, provided we know who they are. This has proved to be an intractable problem since 1991, and even before.

... contd.