“India’s poverty line is actually a starvation line”
Here at Schumacher Centre we’ve been impressed by an article which appeared yesterday on www.countercurrents.org. The article, (linked here), argues that the Government of India’s definition of poverty is a stubborn one.
Devinder Sharma says: “The poverty line reflects the number of people living in acute hunger. It should therefore be called as a starvation line.”
Such a definition ignores wider measures of poverty – such as lack of access to education, health services, etc – allowing the Government of India to keep poverty figures suspiciously low.