Hope Things will Change Tomorrow!

The fall in the level of all India poverty ratio is something to cheer about! But, to know that one-quarter of our population presently are still counted as poor is certainly not a thing to cheer about.

Business Standard on 6th April 2005 wrote:

Only one in four Indians poor

Poverty falls to 24.9% in 2003 from 26.1% in 1999-2000.

The all-India poverty ratio went down from 26.1 per cent in 1999-2000 to 24.9 per cent in 2003.

Rural and urban areas, however, continued to perform differently. While rural poverty went down from 27.1 per cent to 25.2 per cent, urban poverty went up marginally from 23.6 per cent to 23.95 per cent. Share of poor Percentage of people below the poverty line (%) Rural Urban Total 1999-00* 27.1 23.6 26.1 2000-01 24.4 24.5 24.4 2001-02 28.6 24.4 27.6 2003# 25.2 23.95 24.9 * Large sample round # January-December 2003

The two sets of figures, however, are not comparable. This is because the figures for 1999-2000 are based on a quinquennial large sample round, which is used officially to estimate poverty, while the others are thin sample rounds, not always used to calculate poverty figures.

The rough poverty figure calculations are based on scaled-up poverty lines. While the rural poverty line has been scaled up using the consumer price index for agriculture labourers, the consumer price index for industrial workers has been used to scale up the urban poverty line.

The all-India figures are based on the estimate that the rural population constitutes 74.8 per cent of the total population.

The average monthly per capita expenditure in 2003 in rural areas was Rs 554 compared with Rs 1,022 in urban areas.

The survey covered 150,000 people in rural areas and 62,000 in urban areas all over the country. The average household includes 5 and 4.5 persons in rural and urban areas, respectively.