The Narendra Modi-led government witnessed a general strike on September 2, the largest yet in this government’s term. Numbers of strikers were quoted at 150 million to 180 million. The big corporatised media mostly paid it lip-service coverage with the slant of inconvenience caused. Some digital platforms and newspapers like The Hindu highlighted the issues articulated in the workers’ charter of demands, which lay at the heart of the bandh. NDTV’s Ravish Kumar, predictably, did a deep dive discussion on the topic on August 31, as a run-up to the strike. Though he was also critical of the fact that the focus of the strike and the trade unions was on workers in the organised sector, while 94 per cent of Indians work in the unorganised sector.

At the heart of the strike was rationalisation of minimum wages at Rs 18,000 per month. And the minimum wages’ demand calculation had taken the cost of nutrition in our current times where persistent food inflation is the new normal. This IndiaSpend piece by Pavitra Mohan revealed diets in rural India have suffered significantly. “On an average, compared to 1975-1979, a rural Indian now consumes 550 fewer calories and 13 gm protein, 5 mg iron, 250 mg calcium and about 500 mg vitamin A lesser,” she wrote.

On the back of the workers’ strike and minimum wages’ discourse, it is important to revisit India’s poverty measurement issues.

India’s poverty line definition has been pegged at calorie consumption, which has been critiqued by progressive and heterodox economists as minimalist (considering nutritious food items, shelter, education, healthcare expenses are inadequately factored in). In the days before May 2014, the erstwhile Planning Commission used to put out poverty lines for rural and urban India. The month of August is that time of the year when that exercise took place.

Ridiculously low and unquestionably accepted, these poverty lines were discussed in academic papers and panel discussions in the over-professionalised circles of economists and statisticians only. But 2010 changed all that when the union government’s affidavit in the Supreme Court on the Right to Food litigation writ petition 196/2001 was challenged by the Supreme Court bench as destitution line and host of journalists took notice.

In one of the inspiring case studies of journalism-as-a-public-service, the poverty line numbers unleashed a concerted and concerned fact-checking by journalists. From social experiments trying to live below the poverty line to buying food at the official line to testing the menu price-list at the parliament canteen, there would be weeks of breathless reportage. Yes, reportage! And politicians and economists who defended these ridiculous lines would be challenged on air.

That irreverence, fact-check, was journalism 101. In fact, the on-screen, on-print debates were so intense that for the first time, the Vice Chair of the Planning Commission, Dr Montek Singh Ahluwalia, had to go studio-hopping to defend his numbers in 2011. That was one of the finest moments of Indian journalism, when the rarefied debates on poverty numbers and poverty measurement methods were democratised. They became the everyday issue of everyone. Newslaundry also did reactives and commentaries – here by Ranga Uncle (or Anand Ranganathan, as he is formally known) and here by this author. Coming from one of the poorest states of India, this author has been tracking the poverty measurement methods, numbers and the emergent public discourse.

Alas, with the advent of NITI Ayog, we haven’t had the annual ritual anymore. The din around poverty numbers and methods has died down and so has the ground reports and fact-checking. Even erstwhile Reserve Bank governor, C Rangarajan Committee’s 2014 report on poverty measurement and numbers, is yet to be formally accepted and the 2011 Socio Economic Caste Census disaggregated data is also waiting to see the light of day. We have written on Newslaundry, how delayed release and non-release of public survey data sets is also a form of censorship that needs to be called out by media.

Perhaps that is the reason why a very important development in the world of poverty count, has mostly gone unnoticed by the media. In a sign of our times, the Pew Research Report on religion has got much more air time. It has been shovelled on our mind space, but poverty measurement methods are begging for attention

Release of the beta version of the Global Consumption and Income Project

The Global Consumption and Income Project, GCIP, released the beta version of its datasets in April this year in New York. The project, initiated in 2009, is led by three researchers of Indian origin at various institutions (Arjun Jayadev, Rahul Lahoti and Sanjay G. Reddy) and provides two freely accessible datasets: the Global Income Database and the Global Consumption Database. Together, these paint an unprecedented portrait of consumption and income of persons over time, within and across countries and across the world, which can be used by researchers, journalists, public policy analysts in government, international organisations, think tanks, the private sector, activists and the general public. 

The datasets are based on around 2,000 underlying surveys from around the world over 50 years. The published versions provide estimates of monthly real consumption and income for every decile of the population (tenths ranked by level) for more than 160 countries for every year, for more than half a century in as comparable a way as possible. Despite growing concern about issues of living standards, poverty and inequality, enshrined now in the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals, there have been no freely accessible datasets providing for analysis of the level as well as distribution of material living standards with coverage as expansive and of as high a quality as provided by the GCIP. As a result, this is an important global public good. The database has been previously profiled by The Economist here.

 In light of the pressing concerns about global living standards, poverty and inequality, this resource will prove valuable for researchers, multilateral institutions and the interested public who wish to understand key global, regional and national public issues and to identify solutions. The lead authors are committed to curate future versions of the database that will allow users more sophisticated tools, for example, the ability to aggregate distributional data across countries to provide regional portraits of poverty and inequality, and still more comprehensive data.  

It is important to remember that the project lead of GCIP, Prof Sanjay Reddy of New School of Social Research, New York has already done seminal work with Prof Thomas Pogge (currently in Yale) on the inadequacy of the World Bank poverty measurement methodology. They have exposed, not only, is the World Bank substantially under-counting the poor, their international poverty line is flawed too. Even the Indian government concurs, as this piece in Business Standard reveals.

In current times of unprecedented inequality where India is considered the 12th most unequal country in the world, where 45% of wealth is controlled by dollar millionaires, the media has to engage with poverty counting and measurement issues. Persistent coverage, fact-check with living and lived experiences of the poor, will be the much-needed public pressure to fix the mess.  

It will be tragic if counting the poor becomes more difficult than helping the poor and the counting conundrum prevents country governments from designing and implementing pro-poor programmes.