Kitne (garib) aadami the? - bahot sarkar!

Do you know the latest absurd piece of information? The Centre Government & the long-lasting Planning Commission have proposed to constitute new decisive factors for 'officially being labeled - garib'.

Now anyone who earns 29 Rs. in the urban areas and 22 Rs./day in rural parts of India, is no garib!!

These figures are so meaningless. It is difficult believe that in today's age where every commodity is only appreciating and almost everything is on price-wise upward swing, the government thinks this is the ultimate criterion for declaring that there are less garib people now!

One thinks that, is it a ploy to 'decrease' the numbers for 'eligible' people for another ambitious project in the offing - food security scheme? Seems so, Planning Commission's Montek Singh Ahaluwalia evaded this question in the recent press conference, where there was 'a power play of statistics'. 

As per the new report, in rural parts of India, a five member family earned 2234 Rs./month in the year 2004-05 now it is 3364 Rs. In urban areas, the monthly income was 2894 Rs., now there is increase - Rs. 4298.

Top states where the reduction of poverty is more, are - Goa, Himachal Pradesh, MP, Maharashtra, Odisha, Pondicherry, Sikkim, Tamilnadu, Tripura and Uttarakhand. And disturbing reality is that 37.7% in UP and 53.5% of Bihar are still below poverty line.

 

So? So the Planning Commission claims that in Maharashtra, the poverty has reduced by 13.7%. And five years back India had 40.7 crores of garib people, now we have 35.5 crores of them!

  

Is this a relieving good news overall? I don't know. All I know is that it is being complicated, to live life normally on a day-to-day basis.

Postscript: There are rumors floating around that the cooking gas cylinder and petrol prices would increase shortly, now that Congress has lost in the latest State elections and now it can be declared. Never mind, there are escalating problems of coalition management!