COMMITTEES ON POVERTY ESTIMATION

VARIOUS COMMITTEES ON POVERTY ESTIMATION
 

Alagh Committee (1977),Lakdawala Committee (1989)Tendulkar Committee (2005)Saxena committeeHashim Committee

RANGARAJAN PANEL ON POVERTY ESTIMATES

• People spending more than Rs 27.2 per day in villages and Rs 33.3 in cities are not poor, according to latest data released by the government.
• The proportion of the poor has come down to 21.9% of the country’s population in 2011-12 from 37.2% in 2004-05, a decline of 2.18 percentage points every year during seven years of UPA rule.
• The absolute number of poor declined by nearly 137.4 million between 2004-05 and 2011-12 and by around 85 million between 2009-10 and 2011-12.However, there are still 269.7 million poor — 217.2 million in villages and 53.1 million in cities — across the country as against 407.3 million in 2004-05.
• The percentage of persons below the poverty line in 2011-12 has been estimated at 25.7% in rural areas and 13.7% in urban areas.The sharp decline in poverty levels across the country is based on the benchmark of a fresh poverty line. 
• But the timing and the methodology for estimating poverty is questionable as the fresh estimates are based on the Tendulkar methodology, which was junked by the Planning Commission last year after a huge public outcry.
• The commission justified the release of the data using the old methodology saying the data from the National Sample Survey (NSS) 68th round (2011-12) was now available and the Rangarajan committee recommendation will only be available in mid-2014 so it had updated the poverty estimates for the year 2011-12 as per the methodology recommended by the Tendulkar committee. 
• After the controversy, a special survey was conducted by the NSSO to determine poverty, an exercise which taken up after a gap of five years.