'Delivery mechanism need of hour'

Planning Commission member Abhijit Sen on Friday observed that the three-day international seminar on "Revisiting the Poverty Issue: Measurement, Identification and Eradication", should well go beyond the identification issues. He observed that the multi-dimensional issues around poverty need to be addressed in the right perspective. While addressing the seminar on its inaugural day, the chairperson of the seminar, Sen, said that the policy framework needs to encompass a universal delivery mechanism for certain basic minimum supports and services for all the population, which would be a demand-driven approach. "We have wasted enough time in the debate whether poverty has declined? There is no need for such debates now. It is easier to define rich rather than the poor in society," Sen said and added that priority areas have to be defined. As regards the income-centric measures, he said that the universal delivery mechanism should be available for everyone. Quoting the NSSO report, he said that half of the poor do not have any BPL card. Noted economist and MP Arjun Sengupta, chairman of the National Commission for Enterprises in the unorganised sector, in his keynote address, estimated that there were over 830 million people who could be classified as extremely poor, poor, marginal and vulnerable poor. Sengupta observed that while there has been a decline in the number of the extremely poor and the poor categories, the increase in marginal poor and vulnerable poor is a cause of concern. Sengupta observed that a majority of those in the poverty categories belong to SCs, STs and minorities and are predominantly in the unorganised sector. An estimated over 350 million unorganised workers need to be targeted for education and skill development and financial and other supports. In technical sessions, Richard Palmer-Jones of East Anglia university and Amaresh Dubey of National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) talked about poverty measurement, poverty lines and consumer price index in India. Peter Lanjouw and Vijendra (both World Bank) presented a case study of Palanpur in UP in identifying income inequality at the village level. Amaresh Dubey and Arjan Verschoor of East Anglia discussed income mobility and poverty dynamics across social groups in India (1993-05). Pulin Nayak of Delhi School of Economics said agriculture mode is important in identifying the poor in the Indian context. In the forenoon session, during a talk on conceptualising poverty in Today's context, noted economists, including Kaushik Basu of Cornell university, Ashwani Saith of Institute of Social Studies, The Hague and Amitabh Kundu, of JNU, New Delhi, expressed their views. JNU vice chancellor B B Bhattacharya chaired the session on "measurement of poverty: methods, database and comparison over time and space".