Counting India’s poor: Numbers suggest the Need for a Welfare State : Daily Current Affairs

Date: 08/12/2022

Relevance: GS-2: Issues relating to the development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health; Hunger and Poverty related issues.

Key Phrases: Global Hunger Index, Calorie, Child wasting, Child stunting, Child mortality, Food Insecurity, Welfare State, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, UN Statistical Commission, UN Economic and Social Council, PMGKY.

Context:

Recently, FAO released the Global Hunger Index 2022 and this report has caused a lot of controversy with questions being raised as to what exactly we are talking about.

Key Highlights:

India ranks 107 out of 121 countries on the Global Hunger Index 2022.
There is a need to introspect on who exactly is poor in India. The concept is nebulous.

Counting the poor in India:

Calorie Concept
- There was a time when calorie intake was the yardstick.
- But converting only 2,400 calories a day into a monetary value was always challenging.
- Besides, people cannot live with just calories. They need access to other amenities like housing, clothing, education and so on.
  - Hence the calorie concept, though a possible criteria, is not really workable today.
  - But,we need a broader concept.
Income Concept
- The World Bank uses the concept of income per day, which is now taken at $1.90.
- Roughly, this translates to Rs 160 a day in India, and for a family of four would mean Rs 640 a day.
- On a monthly basis, this will come to around Rs 19,200 or Rs 2.3 lakh for a year.
- Such an approach runs the risk of using a universal yardstick across the world which is not right.
- While a weak currency can give a high value in India, this amount may be too low for a developed country (in the US a burger costs more than $1.90).
- Besides, using either the calorie or income approach runs the risk of extrapolation as it is not possible to get these numbers for the entire population.
Income Tax Concept
- Income tax data, while useful in indicating who pays tax, captures only a small segment as it leaves out the big universe of rural people.
- Hence one cannot even use the Rs 2.5 lakh per annum criterion as a cutoff for measuring the poor.
Measuring by Government Schemes
- The government has been aggressive in reaching out to the vulnerable during the pandemic, providing them free food as well as income through cash transfers.
- This can be a good starting point to assess the population that requires support to maintain their minimum needs.
  - But, here the support has been limited to cash transfers or free food.
  - It does not cover education or health, which are supported through other schemes.
- According to IBEF, the PMGKY covered 800 million people.
  - Intuitively, this means that nearly 60 per cent of the 1,350 million population required support from the government and would have found it hard to survive without that.
  - In fact, the National Portal of India in September 2020 had put out a statistic that 42 crore poor people benefited from PMGKY which means that around 30 per cent of the population was declared poor by this yardstick.
- Significance-
  - The government programmes are structured well and the use of technology has ensured that there is targeted delivery of benefits.
  - Leakages can be ruled out.
- Putting all these numbers together, the proportion of vulnerable people in the economy would range between 30 per cent to 60 percent.

Global Hunger Index

About:
- It was created in 2006 and jointly published by Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide using one of FAO’s statistics, among others, to compute its index.
- The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a tool for comprehensively measuring and tracking hunger at global, regional, and national levels.
Key Component Indicators:
- GHI scores are based on the values of four component indicators:
  - Undernourishment (share of the population with insufficient caloric intake);
  - Child wasting (share of children under age five who have low weight for their height, reflecting acute undernutrition);
  - Child stunting (share of children under age five who have low height for their age, reflecting chronic undernutrition);
  - Child mortality (mortality rate of children under age five, partly reflecting the fatal mix of inadequate nutrition and unhealthy environments).
- Based on the values of the four indicators, the GHI determines hunger on a 100-point scale where 0 is the best possible score (no hunger) and 100 is the worst.

Key Finding of Global Hunger Index 2022

Ranks in South Asia:
- India ranks 107 out of 121 countries on the Global Hunger Index in which it fares worse than all countries in South Asia barring war-torn Afghanistan.
Prevalence of undernourishment:
- Prevalence of undernourishment has also risen in the country from 14.6% in 2018-2020 to 16.3% in 2019-2021.
Child wasting rate:
- India’s child wasting rate at 19.3%, is worse than the levels recorded in 2014 (15.1%) and is the highest for any country in the world and drives up the region’s average owing to India’s large population.
Child stunting and child mortality:
- India has shown improvement in these two indicators.
- Child stunting has declined from 38.7% to 35.5% between 2014 and 2022,
- Child mortality has also dropped from 4.6% to 3.3% in between 2014 and 2022.
Worsening GHI score:
- India has shown a slight worsening with its GHI score increasing from 28.2 in 2014 to 29.1 in 2022.

Way Forward:

It can, hence, be said the size of the needy population is close to 60 per cent of the total with at least 30 per cent or half of this amount being most vulnerable.
- In such a situation, it is but natural that the government has to assume the role of a welfare state.
- But the focus has to be on job creation.
Agriculture in particular should be commercialized - the farm laws sought to do so.
- State governments have a big role to play here.
Manufacturing has to be revived to create meaningful jobs.