NITI Aayog poverty paper invites strong rebuttal
NITI Aayog Poverty presser
By Our Special Correspondent
New Delhi, January 23: NITI Aayog claimed in a discussion paper authored by its member looking after the affairs of agriculture that India was able to lift almost 25 crore people out of poverty in the nine years of the Narendra Modi led government at the Centre. The economic experts are now contesting the pompous claims made in the discussion paper authored by the NITI Aayog Member Ramesh Chand.
Santosh Mehrotra who was an advisor to the erstwhile Planning Commission in a post on the social media platform X contested the claims of the NITI Aayog, saying that it was false to state that almost 25 crore people came out of poverty in the last five years. Mehrotra said that poverty indeed has reduced but not to the extent as claimed by the NITI Aayog. It may be recalled that NITI Aayog succeeded the Planning Commission without the powers of the previous entity on financial oversight.
Ashok Gulati and Shyma Jose in an article in the Indian Express has questioned the inclusion of bank accounts and maternal health among the 12 indicators which formed the basis for the NITI Aayog to arrive at the conclusion that almost 25 crore people came out of poverty in the last five years. They argued that India still has 16 crore people under extreme poverty as per the World Bank which measures the number of poor on the basis of income. The global benchmark for poverty according to the World Bank is 2.15 dollars.
Gulati is widely known as an expert of the rural economy. He has revealed a disturbing trend in the rural economy. Gulati claimed in the article that the wages in the rural areas have gone down in worrisome manner during the tenure of the Modi government. He has stated that the rural farm and rural non-farm wages saw growth saw increase of 3.5 per cent and three per cent respectively during 2014-15 and 2018-19. The same for 2019-20 and 2023-24 has been negative. Thus, Gulati argues that the income in the rural areas has drastically gone down.
Mehrotra claims that the Manmohan Singh government faired much better than Modi in improving the rural income of the people. He claimed that despite high inflation during the Manmohan Singh government the rural income grew strongly during the tenure of the UPA dispensation. In a post on the social media platform X, Mehrotra wrote that the “inflation was higher during the tenure of the UPA government, but real wages still grew because non-farm jobs were growing at the rate of five lakhs per year. In the last nine years, real wages have stagnated or fallen as non-farm jobs growth slowed.”
It may be recalled that the Manmohan Singh government had seen strong push on Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and Pradhan Mantri Grameen Sadak Yojna which created rural jobs.
Subscribe: youtube.com/@TheRaisinaHills Join: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaFAp9b60eBiuA8v1x0s
About The Author
