Hello,
Till date the Modi government has refused to draw an official poverty line that helps count India's poor.
A poverty line provides an officially recognised benchmark to estimate the level of deprivation. This becomes an objective measure over time of how well the government is doing in lifting people out of poverty with its welfare programmes and economic policy.
Without a poverty line, the government’s advocates, including the Niti Aayog have made dubious claims of radical poverty reduction, while economists have kept warning that inequality in India has risen post-pandemic. The government used the absence of a poverty line to even claim before the Supreme Court that, even after a decade of population growth and past economic shocks, there are no new poor to be found in the country.
In 2015 Modi set up the Panagariya task force for poverty eradication which was to set a new poverty line. The task force remained inconclusive – it asked for yet another expert committee to determine the poverty line. The government sat on that recommendation for a decade.
Obviously, there were questions in Parliament asking why hasn’t the government defined a poverty line.
The Reporters’ Collective reviewed parliamentary records of the past decade and found that the questions were parried. We found that at least six times the Union government was asked about the poverty line. Each time it deferred an answer. When the parliamentary Committee on Government Assurances pursued it later to get an answer, the government insisted the assurance be dropped each time. It was successful five out of six times.
The Collective’s investigative series Parliament Defied delved into parliamentary promises, such as the one Modi government made on updating the poverty line, and examined their outcomes. Through an exhaustive analysis of 100 parliamentary reports spanning thousands of pages and covering 55 ministries over five years, our reporters revealed the stark reality of government assurances.
Click here to read the last part of the series.
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