‘Absolute destitution in India down to 5%’

New Delhi, February 26

The population of poor Indians is now below 5 per cent, NITI Aayog CEO BVR Subrahmanyam has claimed on the basis of the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey, 2022-23.

Releasing a summary of a survey report on consumption and expenditure, Subrahmanyam said NITI Aayog’s research showed that the monthly per capita consumer spending of India’s bottom five per cent was Rs 1,441 in rural areas and Rs 2,087 in urban. “This data makes me certain about this,” emphasised the NITI Aayog chief.

Though this does not mean that now Indians are better off, it means those of them living in absolute destitution are now less than five per cent, he observed.

Subrahmanyam said the statistics were borne out of the fact that if the old report of the Tendulkar Committee was extrapolated with the data of the survey, it shows that India has less than 5 per cent poor remaining.

The Tendulkar Committee report submitted in late 2009 had recommended the recalculation of rural poverty line in such a way as to reflect money value in rural areas of the same basket of consumption as is used to calculate urban poverty line. This computed the rural poverty headcount ratio for 2004-05 at 41.8 per cent, urban poverty ratio at 25.7 per cent and all-India at 37.2 per cent.

NITI Aayog said 24.82 crore people had come out of multidimensional poverty in the last nine years due to government schemes such as Poshan Abhiyan and Anaemia Mukt Bharat and initiatives for addressing all dimensions of poverty.