The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Tuesday 22 July 2014

BEING POOR IN INDIA: THE NUMBERS

Related post: BEING POOR IN INDIA: IT IS STATISTICAL AS WELL
http://severallyalone.blogspot.in/2014/07/being-poor-in-india.html 

The extreme levels of poverty indicators by the United Nations say there are 1.2 billion extreme poor in the world.

The UN study (UN Millennium Development Goals Report 2014) estimated 400 million or 40 crore of it in India.

That is 1/3rd of the Indian population of around 120 crore.

So, the UN says around 40 crore of the Indians are extremely poor – they survive on less than US$ 1.25 a day, i.e., almost Rs. 75 a day (@Rupee to US$ exchange rate of 60).

Now let’s talk on some more numbers – on how India counts its poor and reduces the poverty ‘found’ among its citizens.


The much debated controversial estimates of the Tendulkar Committee ‘decided’ India had 35.4 crore poor in 2009-10 that came down dramatically to 26.9 crore in 2011-12. The Tendulkar Committee methodology helped India bring down the count of poor by 8.5 crore in just two years. Substantial!

The Rangarajan figures delay the straightening of the Indian poverty curve by increasing the poor headcount to 36.3 crore in 2011-12 (9.4 crore more) though the Rangarajan estimates, too, dramatically reduce the headcount by 9.1 crore from 2009-10 (45.4 crore) to 2011-12. Substantial!

Here, both, Tendulkar and Rangarajan estimates are on similar courses.

On numbers again, India’s poor headcount ratio shot up from Tendulkar Committee’s 21.9% to Rangarajan Committee’s 29.5% in 2011-12 but the story on bringing down the poverty remained upbeat (for the government functionaries and the policymakers). Both methodologies brought down the poverty significantly from 2009-10 to 2011-12.

But the point is – many of whom the United Nations (and the global benchmarking) categorizes as the ‘extreme poor’ – are not even poor by the Indian standards – Tendulkar Committee Poverty Ratio Vs Rangarajan Committee Poverty Ratio Vs the Extreme Poverty Ratio of the UN. 

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com