Numerically Understanding the Poverty Line in India - Part 1

There is always a great deal of discussion involved when we talk about the 'Below Poverty Line' benchmark in India. The poverty estimates are often challenged by civil societies which lead to wide scale protests. A series of such protests broke out in 2002 over a fundamental question of where to draw a 'line' that clearly identifies who the real beneficiaries of the government welfare schemes for the 'poor' are? 

While government claims that the poverty is decreasing, it becomes essential that we understand the poverty indicators through numbers and actual stats and gain an insight of the situation at hand. As per the Planning Commission's poverty estimates made in 2004-5, only 28.3 per cent rural and 25.7 per cent urban in were poor. It is on these lines that makes the Tendulkar Committee (formed after National Development Council's meeting of March 2009) a  prima facie study on analysis of poverty in India. 

Until the the report was published in 2009, all previous poverty estimates in India only looked at poverty from the limited view of money required to buy food to achieve minimum calorie intake (which was fixed at 2100 calories). But Tendulkar knew that poverty is a relative concept and hence in order to draw a line there must be a thorough study of other factors that constitute it. He took a note of the evidence that post liberalization (in 1991), the poor were spending more and more on health and education, areas which were increasingly in the private sector domain. In the pre-liberalization paradigm, the state was supposed to have provided these services cheaply but that model had clearly broken down. The data from the first ever National Family Health Survey in 1993 showed the alarming rates of malnutrition and infant mortality in the country, hitherto ignored by poverty estimates.

As a result, Tendulkar, along with his team, radically overhauled the pre-existing poverty estimation methodology by incorporating health and education expenditure while calculating poverty levels. Not surprisingly, the final results showed that while India’s poverty had declined over the years yet, all along, India had under-estimated its poverty levels. According to his method, the number of the poor in India in 2004–05 rose from 27.5 per cent of the total population to 37.2 per cent. In 2011-12, Planning Commission used the Tendulkar formula to calculate BPL limit at Rs. 816 per capita per month for rural areas and Rs. 1,000 per capita per month for cities. This would mean that the persons whose consumption of goods and services exceed Rs 33.33 in cities and Rs 27.20 per capita per day in villages are not poor.

The above figures ^ would certainly fail to give a complete picture or impart efficacy without a backdrop of government welfare schemes, specially the ones aimed at meeting the food security and health issues. 

Remembering the Titans of Indian Agriculture

Over 50 years since its independence, India has made immense progress towards food security. Indian population has tripled, but food-grain production more than quadrupled: there has thus been substantial increase in available food-grain per capita.

In country such as India where still around 64% of cultivated land is dependent on monsoons, imagining the condition way back prior to the mid 1960's, when the country was struggling with droughts, famines and high dependence on international aids and imports to feed its people, is not a difficult task.

Two years of severe drought in 1965 and 1966 convinced India to reform its agricultural policy, and that India could not rely on foreign aid and foreign imports for food security.

India adopted significant policy reforms focused on the goal of foodgrain self-sufficiency. This ushered in India's Green Revolution. It began with the decision to adopt superior yielding, disease resistant wheat varieties in combination with better farming knowledge to improve productivity. The Indian state of Punjab led India's green revolution and earned itself the distinction of being the country's bread basket.

An Indian geniticist, M. S. Swaminathan, played a leading role in turning the dreams of 'Green Revolution' into reality. Swaminathan, the son of a surgeon, was educated in India and at the University of Cambridge (Ph.D., 1952) as a geneticist. During the next two decades he held a number of research and administrative positions (mostly in the Indian civil service). While working in these positions he helped introduce Mexican semidwarf wheat plants to Indian fields and helped to bring about greater acceptance of modern farming methods. 

He was highly influenced by Norman Borlaug (who is known as the Father of Green revolution). In the 1990s, several environmental writers began describing the agriculture scientist Norman Borlaug, who has died aged 95, as the saviour of "more lives than anyone in history". He was awarded Nobel peace prize of 1970 for his great contribution to the mankind. I found this very nice video on Norman's contribution to agriculture and his response to the challenges faced by farmers worldwide.

Green revolution brought about a phenomenal growth in the food grain production. A hectare of Indian wheat farms that produced an average of 0.8 tonnes in 1948, produced 4.7 tonnes of wheat in 1975 from the same land. 

By 2000, Indian farms were adopting wheat varieties capable of yielding 6 tonnes of wheat per hectare.