I'm investigating this right now. Utsa Patnaik is a veteran economist at JNU. She's done a lot of work on rural poverty and nutrition levels. She has written many op-eds in The Hindu, which seems to be the only newspaper that'll touch her.
http://www.hindu.com/2005/08/05/stories/2005080501971000.htm
According to Patnaik, the rural poverty levels claimed by the Planning Commission is bogus. Poverty is increasing, not decreasing, after the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s. The poverty line has been lowered continously by around 100 calories per diem for every five year period since 1975. So the poverty level claims are gettting increasingly irrelevant and wrong. Also, when the Public Distribution System changed from universal to targeted in 1997 - targeting only the below poverty line people, this had profound implications for the many poor, but not counted people.
Also, check out this interview:
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2113/stories/20040702006302200.htm
I can't find any sort of discussion on this in the newspapers. Shouldn't we be concentrating a whole lot more on this? It's about three-fourths of India's population.
1 comment:
Comments to your response on my blog...it is related to this post too..
Dear Anand,
Before I reply to your comment, I have to say that there is a lot of commonality among our thoughts. Your first blog on "India Unbound" was in the same vein as my first blog on Thomas Freidman's book on globalization. I am glad we think in a similar way. Enjoyed that piece of yours.
http://srinivasanvr.blogspot.com/2005/06/friedmans-globalization-arguments-and.html
As regards Utsa Patnaik's articles, the point remains that she, as a the foremost agrarian economist in our country today, has foretold the miseries of farmers today even way back in 1995. P.Sainath, the Ramon Magsaysay winner said this in a private conversation to me.
Prof. Patnaik has been calling the bluff of the poverty estimators for quite sometime now (since 2005 specifically) finding fault with the methodology, which she accuses has undergone a shift of goalposts (vis-a-vis calorie calculation and even with issues such as selection). The slew of critiques that she has offered have tended to question the BPL identification (which has affected food security) and also issues as destruction of rural economy.
There is a lot of conscience behind her writings, no doubt about the same.
Yet, just one point. Her latest article in EPW claims that from her "direct estimates", rural poverty reaches nearly 87% (for 2004-05, if I remember correctly). Now 87% sounds a figure that seems incredible!. I haven't studied her methodology (what she claims as direct estimates) yet thoroughly. I personally believe that 87% is too high a figure.
As for your questions, whether there has been any critique/ other support for her claims, I know of no mainstream economist today focussing on rural economy in the positivist sense (as in the way it is and the way it functions). Public debate on the rural economy is primarily normative (as to how to "tap the rural market") or how to bridge the urban-rural divide and litany of articles/ public debates can be found for this line of thinking.
But of course, please watch the space at EPW. There might come in some constructive critiques of Prof Patnaik's findings and her suggestions of estimation.
Post a Comment