Vimal Kumar
The World Bank has just come out with a new report based on the India’s 2022-23 Household Consumption Expenditure Survey in which it has declared that India has virtually ended extreme poverty, with just 2.3 per cent of the population living below the extreme poverty line. It claims that between 2011-12 and 2022-23, 171 million people were lifted above this $2.15 per day poverty line. This claim is a blatant lie and bears little resemblance to the reality millions of people in India continue to live.
Over the past 11 years, the Modi government has dealt massive blows to the livelihoods of people in India, one after another. These include demonetisation in 2016, imposition of GST in 2017, a completely unplanned and draconian lockdown in 2020, the proposed three farm laws in 2020, and the new labour codes in 2019 and 2020. The expenditure on welfare schemes such as MGNREGA has stagnated. Not only have accelerated privatisation and contractualisation resulted in a reduction of government jobs, even in the jobs that remain, the vacancies have increased manifold. Availability of bank credit for agriculture and small businesses has shrunk while big businesses have had a bonanza.
Fixing the Data
While Indian people are struggling with an unprecedented economic crisis, the government has worked overtime to manage the statistics and the headlines. In 2019, in an unprecedented move, the government refused to release data from a household consumption survey that was showing a sharp increase in poverty. It then went on to manufacture a multi-dimensional poverty index, using selectively chosen indicators, to claim that there had been a sharp decline in poverty. Along with this, the National Sample Survey Office was made to revise its methodology of consumption surveys in such a way that it would yield highest estimates of consumption and so that it could be used to claim a decline in poverty. The well-established methodology for conducting consumption surveys was discarded, and a new methodology was used in which each sample household was surveyed three times, to collect data on different items of consumption. This resulted in each household reporting consumption of a larger number of items, thus raising the overall estimate of consumption expenditure.
The World Bank report completely ignores the fact that these two surveys of 2011-12 and 2022-23 used very different methodologies and their estimates are not comparable, and goes on to claim a decline in poverty by comparing estimates from these two surveys. It only mentions that “inequality may be underestimated due to data limitations”. No mention is made of the fact that the changes in methodology were such that they were bound to show higher levels of consumption expenditure and thus lower poverty.
Apples & Oranges
Along with the modified consumption survey, a new avatar of the Employment-Unemployment Surveys by the name of Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) has also been created in which rural women participating in marginal activities such as livestock rearing out of economic distress are treated as employed. If, in absence of any more remunerative employment opportunity, a woman keeps a goat or a cow in the house and rears it, the PLFS treats the woman as employed. Unpaid women workers in household enterprises too are counted as employed. It is this kind of ‘self-employment’ among rural women that lies behind the World Bank’s assessment that “employment rates, especially among women, are rising”. On the other hand, most precarious forms of employment — footloose construction workers, food-delivery workers cycling for hours in peak summer heat or biting winter cold and Uber drivers sleeplessly driving cars for days on end — is the only employment available to a vast majority of urban workers.
India’s statistical system, once a pride of the country, has been destroyed by the Modi government. Instead of using valid statistical methods to effectively and accurately capture socio-economic conditions in the country, it has been reduced to producing vulgar statistics to further the government’s propaganda and to hide government’s apathy towards the deepening economic crisis in the country. People facing a very different reality will never relate to these statistical falsehoods. We must expose the disjunction between facts and this statistical fiction, and rally people based on their lived experiences against this anti-people government.