India's national economic planning commission backed away on Monday from a controversial definition that any villager earning around 50 cents a day was not poor following a storm of protest. The poverty benchmark had been condemned by social activists as unrealistic - especially with India's soaring inflation.
Last month, the commission told the Supreme Court that those with a daily income of 25 rupees or 50 cents in villages rising to 65 cents in cities, were above the poverty line. Some 70 percent of Indians live in villages. The poverty line measure is used to help determine government welfare benefit entitlements.
Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia said it had not been the commission's intention to suggest that "benefits should be limited to those below the poverty line." The poverty definition submitted to the court "was clearly a rock bottom level of existence" and was not an acceptable standard of living for the "common man," he told a news conference.
"We know that very well everybody at that level of existence are under significant stress and even above that level households are vulnerable," he said. The results of a new census survey would be used for defining who should be entitled to government welfare benefits, he added. "The Planning Commission is not taking the view that benefits should be restricted to only those below the BPL (below the poverty line)," he said.
While India boasts a burgeoning class of urban rich thanks to a rapidly expanding economy, hundreds of millions of people still face a lack of food, clean water and proper housing. Ahluwalia's statements came after India's Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh and several impoverished states where tens of millions of poor are dependent on state entitlements criticised the new poverty benchmarks.
Indian social activists had also challenged Ahluwalia to live on 50 cents a day and prove that it was enough money on which to survive. The commission had told the court that anyone earning more than 50 cents in villages and 65 cents in cities would have enough funds for "food, education and health." The census "will seek to ensure that no poor or deprived household will be excluded from (welfare) coverage," Ahluwalia annd Ramesh said in a joint statement. Around 37 percent of India's 1.2 billion population are currently deemed to live below the poverty line and are being given subsidised food and cooking fuel through state-owned stores.
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