By IANS,
New Delhi : More than a third of India, or 37.2 percent of the population, has been classified as poor, Minister of State for Planning V. Narayanasamy said Thursday.
Answering a question from Gyan Prakash Pilania in the Rajya Sabha, the minister said the Planning Commission had accepted that 41.8 percent of the rural and 25.7 percent of the urban populations were poor.
This put the “national poverty head count” at 37.2 percent, he said in a written reply.
These figures, he said, came after the Planning Commission embraced the revised poverty lines for 2004-05 as recommended by an expert group headed by Suresh D. Tendulkar.
The minister also said that the percentage of Indians living below the global poverty line as defined by World Bank had fallen from 59.8 percent in 1981 to 51.3 percent in 1990 and to 41.6 percent in 2005.
He said it was the Planning Commission that provided official estimates of the number and proportion of people living below the poverty lines at the national and state levels and in rural and urban areas.
“These poverty estimates are based on a large sample survey of household consumption expenditure carried out by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) after an interval of every five years.
The next poverty estimates based on the Tendulkar methodology “will be available when the data of 66th Round of NSSO Survey for 2009-10 becomes available in end-2011”, he said.