Poverty estimation committees in India
Y K Alagh Committee
Till 1979, the approach to estimate poverty was traditional i.e. lack of income.
It was later decided to measure poverty precisely as starvation i.e. in terms of how much people eat. This approach was first of all adopted by the YK Alagh Committee’s recommendation in 1979 whereby, the people consuming less than 2100 calories in the urban areas or less than 2400 calories in the rural areas are poor.
The logic behind the discrimination between rural and urban areas was that rural people do more physical work. Moreover, an implicit assumption was that the states would take care of the health and education of the people.
Suresh Tendulkar Committee
In 2005, Suresh Tendulkar committee was constituted by the Planning Commission.
The Tendulkar panel committee on poverty submitted its report in 2009.
As per the report, poverty estimates will be based on private household consumer expenditure of households
The Tendulkar panel stipulated a benchmark daily per capita expenditure of Rs. 27 and Rs. 33 in rural and urban areas. But Rangarajan committee raised these limits to Rs. 32 and Rs. 47, respectively, and worked out the poverty line at close to 30%. With estimates of Rangarajan committee.
Saxena Committee 2009
This committee was set up by the Rural Development Ministry to suggest methods to suggest methods to identify BPL families in rural areas, to review the methodology for conducting BPL Census in rural areas. It recommended doing away with the score based ranking of rural households used then
gave the famous methodology of automatic inclusion and automatic exclusion
as far as I remember , it said poor in India are as high as 50%.
Lakdawala Formula
Till as recently as 2011, the official poverty lines
were based entirely on the recommendations of the Lakdawala Committee of 1993.
This poverty line was set such that anyone above them would be able to afford
2400 and 2100 calories worth of consumption in rural and urban areas
respectively in addition to clothing and shelter. These calorie consumptions
were derived from YK Alagh committee
only.
