32 bucks a day (70 cents a day) keeps poverty line away!

India recently redefined the official line of poverty to INR 32 a day in Urban and 26 in Rural areas. A couple of months back, Brazil redefined its official line of poverty at $ 1.5 per day with no urban or rural differentiation. Indian poverty line now stands below World Bank's $ 1.25 a day.

Let us compare this with the poverty line definition in some of the other key emerging nations:

Poverty line *
India 780
China 1,370
Brazil 1,250
Indonesia 740
South Africa 1,300

* defined as per person, per year in PPP terms.

Poverty line definition cannot really be compared strictly on a one to one basis given the differences in eating habits and other requirements like heating and cooling for basic survival. For example, heating is a basic necessity for survival in the Chinese winters while in India, heating is not needed for most of the population. However, it is quite disheartening to see India in the company of Indonesia as far as defining poverty is concerned.

The way we define poverty broadly dictates the direction of poverty alleviation programs - if the threshold is defined too low, we ignore a large section of population in need of support. Danger of defining it too high is an unnecessary cost to the taxpayers with no resulting benefits.

In my view, given the prevailing inflation rates in India, the $ 780 per year poverty line in urban areas seems too low. Even in the worse of shanty towns, an individual ends up paying at least $ 350 a year in rent for a shared accommodation in Delhi. I am sure Mumbai and Bangalore would be higher and Calcutta, Chennai, Pune etc would be in 300-350 range. Is it even imaginable that in about $ 450 more, a person can afford to have 2100 calories of food every day, keep two clean pairs of clothes to wear, commute for the bare minimum extent for work and send kids to school. I really doubt. Last I heard, wheat flour and potato now sell at more than a dollar a KG while onions costs many times more.

This brings me to the question of why would a Congress led Government want to define the poverty line such low. Congress after all is a socialist welfare state ideology party - higher level of poverty for them means an excuse to launch corruption ridden poverty alleviation schemes named after the Nehru/Gandhi scions. This is one controversy that therefore completely beats me - your views welcome.