Planning Commission to set up new group to rework Suresh Tendulkar's poverty math soon

NEW DELHI: The country's main planning body on Thursday said it will take a re-look at the just-released poverty figures, which have drawn widespread criticism for its criteria and even elicited concern from the prime minister. The Planning Commission said it will set up a new technical group in the next three months to re-visit the Suresh Tendulkar methodology of estimating poverty and devise a new measure of poverty that will be consistent with current realities. "We believe that the poverty numbers based on the Suresh Tendulkar report need to be revisited. The technical group will devise a new methodology that will reflect the changed perception of poverty and the reality on the ground," said Ashwani Kumar, minister for state for planning. Kumar announced the plan panel's decision at a press conference that was not attended by Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia or member Saumitra Chaudhary, who on Tuesday had refuted any immediate plans of a re-look. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, too, said, the Tendulkar committee report was not all-inclusive. "We need a multi-layered approach to assess poverty estimates," he said on the sidelines of a function to give away this year's Padma Awards. The estimates were based on a poverty line of Rs29 per day per capita expenditure for people in urban areas and Rs22 per day per person for those in rural areas, which has been criticised for being too low. Last year, states such as Bihar had voiced concern over making the poverty line an eligibility criteria for government welfare programmes, particularly the Food Security Bill. The panel had released on Monday poverty ratio for 2009-10 that showed a decline of 7.3 percentage points from 37.2% in 2004-05 to 29.8% in 2009-10. A day later, Ahluwalia blamed the National Sample Survey Organisation for under reporting consumption number because of which the poverty line had been set low. Kumar said the rapid growth in the country in the last seven to eight years, combined with a change in perception of poverty during the period, led the commission to question the Tendulkar estimates that have become outdated and unrealistic.