This wonder is achieved, if you believe the new World Bank formula of calculating poor! The way our government is now planning to reduce the poor people in 'statistics' instead of reducing poverty, the World Bank's revised Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) is intending to do the same. The revised PPP and poverty line would mean a dramatic decrease of poor people in India and the globe. And this would further justify the current form of exploitative global private capital which alienates the poor people from their natural resources and makes them real poor. And investments in poverty reduction would also be reduced because we would have supposedly achieved the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of reducing poverty by half by the year 2015. What a formula?
Image: Business Standard at the link shared below
While I have posted the link to the detailed article by Nitin Sethi published in Business Standard on this, the following paragraph is worth quoting here.
By taking the World Bank-prescribed $1.25 as the poverty line on the previous PPP index, India had 402 million poor people in 2010. But with the revised PPP number, the Centre for Global Development's back of the envelope calculations put the figure at 102.3 million in 2010. Brookings Institution suggests it would fall down to as low as 98.9 million. Global poverty itself would fall by more than half from 1.2 billion poor people to 571.3 million overnight, for economists at least. That means the Millennium Development Goals target for 2015 has been met. The story of this statistical game lies behind the method of calculating the PPP index and the global poverty line.
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