Bharti-AXA deals get nod; govt okays 19 FDI proposals

The government on Tuesday approved 19 foreign direct investment (FDI) proposals worth ` 2,165.04 crore, including French insurance company AXA’s plan to raise stake in its life insurance joint venture with Sunil Mittal-led Bharti Group.

AXA will hold 49% stake in the life insurance venture with Bharti, resulting in an inflow of ` 858.6 crore. It will also increase its stake in the general insurance joint venture with Bharti, involving an investment of ` 431.40 crore.

Together, AXA’s FDI in Bharti group will be worth ` 1,290 crore.

These are the first FDI proposals that have been cleared after the passage of the Insurance Bill in March, which allowed raising of FDI cap from 26% to 49%.

The government approved these proposals based on the recommendations of the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB), a finance ministry statement said. Among others, Mylan Laboratories’ FDI proposal worth ` 128.77 crore was also been cleared. ( With PTI inputs) Earlier, India used to define the poverty line based on a method defined by a task force in 1979. It was based on expenditure for buying food worth 2,400 calories in rural areas, and 2,100 calories in urban areas. In 2011, the Suresh Tendulkar Committee defined the poverty line on the basis of monthly spending on food, education, health, electricity and transport. According to this estimate, a person who spends 27.2 According to critics, the government has deliberately kept poverty line low. A low poverty line has enabled the government to show that millions have moved out of poverty. This, critics say, is factually incorrect as the definition of poverty line is disputed. They also say that the data lacks statistical rigour and has been released to gain political mileage.

How do other countries define the poverty line?

Economists set a poverty line to fix a threshold income in order to get a headcount of poor people in a country. Households earning below the threshold, or the poverty line, are considered poor. Different countries have different methods of defining the threshold income depending on local socio-economic needs.

How is poverty measured in Europe?

In most of Europe, a family with a net income of less than 60% of the “median net disposable income” — a broad measure of the national average income net of taxes — is counted as poor. This would imply that a family in the United Kingdom would be poor if its current net income is less than £250 (about

22,500) a week. A poverty line “relative” to the national average also gives an idea about the state of inequality. A sharp jump in the income of the richest will set the poverty line higher by pulling up the national average income. This could make the poor appear even poorer though their incomes may have risen.

How is it measured in the US?

The US uses a much simpler method. The poverty line represents the basic cost of food for a family multiplied by three. The threshold level is adjusted for inflation every year. A family is counted as poor if its pre-tax income is below this threshold. In 2011 — the latest year for which data is available — the pov-

How does the Indian poverty scenario compare with the African countries?

A comparison shows that India poverty line is abysmally low. For instance, South Africa had three poverty lines — food, middle and upper — and all three were higher than that of India. The food poverty line in Indian rupees was 1,841 per capita per month in 2010, middle poverty line was at 2,445 and upper poverty line was at 3,484. Per capita poverty line of a rural adult Rwandian in Indian terms comes out to be 892 per month, slightly more than 816 for a person in rural India. One should not forget that prices of food items in Rwanda are less than in India.