Beyond Data Poverty

In 1995, the UNDP initiated a Regional Poverty Alleviation Programme in several South Asian countries. This volume comprises Indian papers conunissioned by the programme. Of the eight chapters, seven are based on contributed papers. The authorship of chapters is not ascribed. However, the editors acknowledge the contribution on which each chapter is based.

Chapter 1 (editors) and chapter 2 (Suresh Tendulkar) provide a detailed quantitative picture of poverty incidence. Chapter 1 broadly describes the dynarnics of poverty incidence over the last two decades. Chapter 2 contains an extremely detailed decomposition of the changing incidence of poverty over the 1983-93 period. It points out that only two states, Assam and Haryana registered an increase in rural poverty, whereas only one, Andhra Pradesh, showed an increase in urban poverty. However, absolute levels of poverty are still high.

 

The rest of the book attempts to go "beyond". Chapter 3 (Abusaleh Shariff) analyses NCAEWs 1994 survey of about 33,000 households. It goes beyond the narrow income-based definition by computing the Capability Poverty Measure, which combines the percentage of undernourished children, percentage of women going through non-institutional deliveries and the female illiteracy rate. Chapter 4 (R Radhakrishna) looks at food security. It traces patterms of food production and food consumption, nutrient intake on the other. It generally supports the position that state intervention is vital to ensure food security.

Chapter 5 (MSS Meenakshisundaram) and Chapter 7 (Seeta K Prabhu) look at the structure and financing of poverty alleviation schemes in India. Chapter 5 develops a scheme for distinguishing between strategies - income-enhancing, skill-enhancing, asset-redistributive, and so on. It looks at the record with respect to these usually complementary strategies, and also assesses the institutional framework within which these schemes are implemented. Chapter 7 looks at government expenditures on potentially poverty-alleviafing activities. It seeks statistical relationships between ex-oenditures and outcomes across; states, with some success.

Chapter 6 (also Seeta K Prabhu) would have been more effective it' placed earlier in the book. It calculates another composite index, the Human Poverty Index for the period 1991-93. This combines five variables related to longevity, illiteracy, malnutrition, and access to safe water and health services. The ordering of states by this index does not seriously diverge from that obtained by the conventional income criteria. Chapter 8 (Ravi Srivastava) gets away from the quantitative approach entirely. It looks at how people perceive themselves as being poor or not poor. It demonstrates that self-perceptions of poverty are based on a complex array of factors. The implication is that the sellperception of poverty would vary across regions, across gender groups, perhaps even across materially similar individuals.

The book does not quite five up to its promise to go beyond income poverty. Each chapter stands out by itself as a source of information and analysis. However, none of them, probably in the interests of space, has a concluding section that does any justice to their contents.

The greater problem that I see goes beyond this work, which I take to represent a quality standard of research on poverty in India. In 1999,

we are making assessments of poverty from data for 1993-94. Having placed poverty reduction at the very top of our policy agenda, it is strange that we do not have a more contemporary indicator of how we are performing. Surely we can find innovative ways to work round that constraint, e.g., focus groups spread over the country, whose economic conditions can be monitored. Over time, this would set the stage for a panel on income dynamics, which would give us a much better sense of how poor "people", as opposed to "numbers" are faring. If the UNDP intends to make an impact on poverty, it should think about this.