Vandals Of History Afghanistan's Taliban regime remains undeterred from its hard-line agenda of destroying historically valuable Buddhist idols. A look at the present regime and its slide to orthodox fundamentalism at a time when a drought has ravaged its economy and people.

Taking On the Family
Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Laloo Yadav is once again facing a tough fight for survival--this time prompted by a near revolt in the RJD fuelled by rumours of a dynastic takeover. Ranjan Yadav has emerged as a potential rival to Rabri Devi, enjoying the support of both the party rebels and the NDA allies.

Chennai Confusion
The upshot of the great Tamil circus: Jayalalitha needs Moopanar, but not the Congress.

Creepy Acquisition
With Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha determined to bring corporate payslips comprehensively into the taxman's dragnet, the salaried class is having a few palpitations. For them, it means that a long era of tax-free emoluments is coming to an end.

"Indians lack unity"
Two of cricket's finest brains met for a rare conversation:Bishen Singh Bedi takes on the role of interviewer for Aaj Tak, seeking to get into the mind of Australian captain Stephen Waugh.

Revenge Of the Bears The sudden fall in share-prices points to yet another rigging controversy, and raises questions about the efficacy and credibility of SEBI as a regulator.

VIEWPOINT: KAUTILYA

Lifting The Poverty Veil

India loses Pravin Visaria just as his handiwork becomes official

By Jairam Ramesh

The sheer fragility of life is so very striking. Pravin Visaria, one of India's finest economists, suddenly passed away, virtually unnoticed, just as Yashwant Sinha was presenting his recent budget. Visaria was director of the Delhi-based Institute of Economic Growth. He also chaired the governing council of the Centre's National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO). It was in this capacity that he influenced the debate on India's poverty numbers. He would have gone to his final abode vindicated by Sinha's words in the budget speech that "poverty has fallen from 36 per cent in 1993-94 to 26 per cent or less now".

Our poverty numbers are derived from sample surveys carried out by the NSSO on consumer expenditure. The poverty line is the monthly expenditure incurred in getting a daily calorie intake of 2,435 kilocalories in rural and 2,095 kilocalories in urban areas. The Planning Commission computes state-specific poverty lines and ratios. The national poverty line is worked out implicitly and the all-India poverty ratio obtained as the weighted average of statewise poverty ratios.

Every five years full surveys on 1,20,000 households are carried out. In the intervening period, "thin" samples of around 20,000 households are surveyed. The "thin" samples are not considered robust enough to be used to draw any firm conclusions. Only the full-year surveys are considered authoritative; after 1993-94, the next full survey was carried out during July 1999-June 2000.

In 1993-94 as in all previous surveys, respondents were asked questions on spending on food items based on a 30-day recall, that is, what they had spent a month prior to the date of the survey. This 30-day recall period is unique to Indian surveys and goes back to an experiment done by P.C. Mahalanobis way back in 1954 in 76 West Bengal villages covering 1,254 households. Visaria believed that this would tend to underestimate spending on food since people cannot be expected to reliably recall their spending patterns after 30 days had elapsed. Poverty would thus get overestimated. He held the view that a seven-day recall period would be more realistic, particularly for food items, which for most Indians remains the bulk of the consumption basket. In fact, he got the "thin" sample surveys between 1994-95 and 1998-99 to include the seven-day recall period question as well and from the results that were obtained Visaria went public in July 2000 saying that the seven-day recall period yields significantly lower estimates of poverty than through the use of the 30-day recall period.

Thus, in 1999-2000 the seven-day recall period was used for the very first time for a full survey year. Presumably respondents were asked questions based on a seven-day recall period first and then were asked questions based on the 30-day recall. This was unlike in the "thin" sample surveys where different households were asked questions based on seven-day and 30-day recall periods. This was certainly the case for the period July-December 2000. What happened later is a bit unclear but it transpires that the NSSO issued guidelines to change the sequence. It is possible, as some experts fear, that the data, at least for the first half of 1999-2000, would have got contaminated. What may have happened is that a respondent would have replied on a seven-day recall and then simply multiplied by four and given the answer for a 30-day recall. Also, for clothing, footwear and durable goods, the 1999-2000 survey used a 365-day recall unlike in 1993-94 when a 30-day recall was used. Puzzlingly, the seven-day recall yields a poverty estimate which is only about 3 percentage points lower than that based on a 30-day recall. In earlier surveys this difference was at least five times more.

But Visaria himself was most insistent that the 1999-2000 survey was well designed and supervised and felt that just because the results of 1999-2000 did not appear to fit preconceived notions, we should not dismiss the numbers outright. He thought that the 1999-2000 survey yielded "better" poverty estimates. And he said this without having any liberalisation axe to grind.

What does one make of the poverty numbers themselves? All that can be said is that we measured something in 1993-94 and got 36 per cent. We measured the same thing but by a different methodology and got 26 per cent. Even when we compare like for like, that is estimates based on a 30-day recall, we cannot straightaway conclude, as Sinha did in his budget speech, that poverty has fallen. The data are simply not comparable. Poverty may well have fallen and there is other evidence that it indeed did in the 1990s but the only way forward is to carry out a full-year survey in 2002-03 on the same basis as 1993-94 and get a better fix on the numbers. Or we use the 1999-2000 methodology as a reference point for the future. It is also time that individual states themselves carried out large-scale poverty and well-being surveys at regular intervals.

(The author is with the Congress party. These are his personal views.)

MetroScape
Triple Act
What I would love to do more than anything else in the world is to write another play," says Gurcharan Das. "But I don't know if I have the courage." He should have dollops of it, going by the audience reaction to his 9 Jakhoo Hill--performed to mark the release of Three English Plays by Das --at Delhi's India Habitat Centre
last week.
more...

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