2022 marks an important decadal anniversary.
It is exactly a decade to when the Rangarajan Committee was set up to come up with fresh parameters for India’s poverty line. It submitted a report in 2014 but the government is yet to take a call. Also, Planning Commission last released poverty data for 2011-12. The number of poor in the country was pegged at 269.8 million or 21.9% of the population. After this, it has been ten years, but no official poverty estimates in India have been released.
For a democracy like India, with alleviation of poverty a primary business of the State and this government’s rhetoric of being ‘anti-elite’, it is puzzling why it has not thought it fit to confront the obvious question for eight years. With the destruction of the informal economy after demonetisation in 2016, India saw a fall in private consumption expenditure for the first time since figures started being recorded.
Unemployment shot up to the highest level since 1970s. There are other indicators that point to a worsening situation; India’s falling ranks in the Global Hunger Index and zooming demand for the Rural Employment Guarantee, are a barometer of distress. The question of how many Indians are poor and what kind of an economy we really are, needs to be honestly confronted.