There is a bewildering maze of debates about defining and measuring poverty and hunger. I am reminded of an irreverent economics professor who compared statistics to a hapless impoverished tribal man arrested in a police station. “If you torture both enough,” he tells his students, “you can force them to admit to anything!”
Yet we cannot afford to ignore the sometimes abstruse intellectual polemics around estimating poverty and hunger levels and trends, because especially since the 1990s in India, this calculus has been deployed by public planners and finance managers to justify cutting back public expenditures on social and food security. They targeted a hitherto universal public distribution system (through a country-wide network of subsidised food grain ration shops), to only those who are officially ‘measured' and certified to be poor. This approach persists in current officials proposals around the Food Security Bill. When poverty lines are fixed by politicians and administrators with one eye on political implications and another on budgetary ones, commentator Ashwani Saith pithily surmises that this “usually leads to a squint and to cock-eyed vision”.
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2010/07/18/stories/2010071850120400.htm
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