As many as 27 prominent economists on Monday issued a statement rejecting the
official national poverty lines set by the Planning Commission, at Rs 32 and Rs 26 per capita per day for urban and rural areas, respectively.
"We do not consider these as acceptable benchmarks to measure the extent of poverty in India," the statement said.
"In any case, irrespective of the methodology we adopt to measure poverty, the number of poor and hungry people in the country remains unacceptably large," it added.
Outcry over Plan panel setting poverty line Rs 32/day The statement said, "While academic debates can continue on the appropriate measure of poverty in India, its extent and whether it is decreasing over time, we strongly believe that it is unacceptable and counterproductive to link the official poverty estimates to basic entitlements of the people, especially access to food."
The 27 economists who signed the statement include Pulin Nayak of the Delhi School of Economics; S. K. Thorat, chairman, ICSSR; Amiya Bagchi, director, Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata; Prabhat Patnaik and Jayati Ghosh from JNU; S. Subramanium from the Madras Institute of Development Studies; former Union minister Y. K. Alagh and former West Bengal finance minister Ashok Mitra.
The statement points out that official surveys of nutritional intakes and outcomes indicate that undernutrition is much more widespread than income poverty, however defined.
It is also widely recognised that the targeted public distribution system (PDS) introduced since 1997 has done more harm than good by creating divisions even among the poor and has led to massive errors of exclusion, it adds.
Recent evidence clearly establishes that states which have moved towards near universalisation of the PDS have performed much better in increasing offtake and reducing leakages, the statement observes.
"Restoring the universal PDS appears to us as the best way forward in combating hunger and poverty. This is not only feasible within the available fiscal space of the Union government but must be a policy priority in the backdrop of high and persistent food price inflation," the economists have stated.
Courtesy: Mail Today 
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