Poverty in India

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.