Shivam Vij reports on the lives untouched by the Vibrant Gujarat campaign:
The state has found a simple way of showing a decline in poverty figures. It has redefined poverty lines for both rural and urban areas. So you would be counted as poor in a Gujarat town if you earn Rs 541.16 a month ($0.45 a day) or less. In a Gujarat village, the figure is even lower — Rs 353.93 a month or 30 cents a day. Most of the other states, including the poor ones like Jharkhand, keep the poverty net wider. The internationally accepted figure is a dollar a day. This removes large numbers from the BPL list and prevents them from receiving the benefits of poverty alleviation and development programmes.
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Gaurav Sabnis
Nov 8th, 2007 at 8:49 am | #
I actually suggest linking to this page instead – http://www.pragoti.org/pragoti/news_detail.php?news_id=312
The article is almost identical except for grammatical paraphrasing, though to be fair, Avinash Kumar has been acknowledged at the beginning of Shivam’s article.