The journalist’s fight against the rumour mill
It is not that easy to prove that something does not exist
is a former member of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory
Council is a development economist and author of ‘The Making of a Catastrophe: The Disastrous Economic Fallout of the COVID19 Pandemic in India’
WNITI Aayog B.V.R. Subrahmanyam recently claimed that less than 5% of Indians now live below the poverty line. He made the claim based on the findings of the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES), 202223. Mr. Subrahmanyam argued that the average consumption expenditure in the bottom 5% of India’s population, as estimated by the survey, is about the same as the poverty line in India, suggesting that the poverty rate in India is somewhere in the range of 0 to 5%. Has poverty really dropped to 5% in India? Surjit Bhalla and Jayati Ghosh discuss the question in a conversation moderated by
Edited excerpts:
Surjit Bhalla: Jayati Ghosh:
inston Churchill could not have imagined how prescient his words would be; how decades after he uttered them, they would be truer than they ever were. “A lie gets half way around the world before truth gets a chance to put its pants on,” he once said. This is equally true of rumours too.
Kategate, as the infamous doctored photo incident might well be called, has a voyeuristic world in its hold. An image of the Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton, posing with her three children, her arms wrapped around two of them, released by Buckingham Palace on the occasion of Mother’s Day, was in the news for all the wrong reasons. The media discovered that the image had been manipulated and spent time and energy speculating about it. Rumours swirled at greater speed after Kate herself admitted that she had edited the photo. The memes and updates fed the relentless interest of the world, as the ‘non story’ travelled everywhere.
Across the world, journalists battle with the ability of rumours to capture the imagination and attention of the public. Sometimes, this support from the public offers a bulwark of resistance against truth itself, making the job of countering rumours with facts burdensome.
In the Indian subcontinent, it has become common for rumours to gather moss until rigorous factchecks lead people to sometimes delete their posts. But rumours are most resilient; they keep cropping up. It is true that some may not be very harmful — for instance, old videos of heavy rainfall often circulate repeatedly, much like boot cuts become fashionable every few years. But others are more significant and impact the life of the person/persons involved. All of them, though, are gloriously at odds, in varying degrees, with the facts of the case.
It is not that easy to prove that something does not exist. This makes a journalist run around in circles to look for evidence that something has not happened. Among journalists who have done this,
Prashanth
We are talking about the change in the level of poverty. In 201112, the poverty level in India, based on the same poverty line (as of today), was 12.5%. Now it’s down to 5%. If you apply the poverty line, which is today close to ₹1,500 in rural areas and ₹1,800 in urban areas according to the Tendulkar poverty line, you get something close to a poverty level of 2%. Therefore, we have moved from something like 12.5% in 201112 to 2% in 202223 and that definitely suggests that the poverty line needs to be raised around the world. Extreme poverty is what has been eliminated. We have made good progress, but we have to raise the poverty line. If we apply the World Bank’s lowermiddleincome line to calculate poverty, we get a poverty level of something like 25% in rural areas and 11% in urban areas, which gives you a poverty rate of 21%. So, there is no question that the poverty line needs to be raised.
Whatever is being used as the poverty line today is inadequate. But I want to highlight a couple of things. First, officially, there is no declared income poverty line right now. What Surjit is using is the Tendulkar line adjusted for consumer price inflation and the World Bank’s purchasing power poverty line of $2.15 a day, both of which would give you less than 5% extreme poverty or extreme destitution. However, there is a problem. The Tendulkar line itself was not really conceptually based on anything. It broke away from the idea that you need a certain minimum calorie requirement to be fulfilled and therefore households that spend at least that much on calories would be above the line. So, we don’t actually have a poverty
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Perumal J.
The claim is that less than 5% of Indians live below the poverty line. Can you explain how the poverty line is defined in India? Does the poverty line need to be raised?
Farmers near Raipur, Chhattisgarh. the worst job is to confirm that some one is not yet dead. A wellknown example is the recent declaration by a fake account on social media that Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen was no more. Telugu film star Sarath Babu, too, suffered a hasty end at the hands of social media, while he was ailing. Journalists who constantly and compulsively trawl social media probably caught this rumour earlier than the families, and the scramble began to “break the news”. But how do you decently ask someone if they are alive? Or for that matter, ask them if their mother, spouse or children are alive? We journalists hem and haw. Sometimes we may also come across as slowwitted to the people to whom we say, “I hope all is well. Just calling to check.”
The lack of access to the truth is frustrating. Some of the toughest things to confirm are facts about the hospitalisation of celebrities or political leaders. Unlike parts of the West, where a culture of voluntary disclosure of information by the managers of celebrities is common, in India, you hear only what the celebrity’s family or coterie want you to hear. Even those in the know are probably barred from speaking. Fair enough, but it only creates an atmosphere where rumours not only germinate but also thrive.
The case of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, who spent months at a private hospital before she passed away, was one such instance. A Tamil news channel announced one night that she had died, but there was nothing official to confirm this — neither a bulletin nor an official release from the government that she was technically still heading. The short period that followed that “news break” might best be slotted in the ‘berserk phase’ of every journalist’s life. It turned out, of course, that the channel had jumped the gun. In this age where there is a burning desire to break news, even if tragic, without confirmation, there is no peace, neither for journalists nor the people involved.
line in India. The government has not announced any clear poverty line. Also, we have to be careful when comparing this survey over time because the official report makes it explicit that this is not comparable with earlier surveys.
The survey says consumption expenditure has gone up about 2.5 times since 201112, but critics say income has not risen in tandem to corroborate this claim. What explains the gap? SB:
Well, that’s in nominal terms. Consumption has gone up per capita by about 40% over the last 11 years in real terms. So, I don’t see what the problem with that is. There are other figures that corroborate the claim. Look at wages. The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) provides you with data on the wages of different workers. For agricultural workers, wages have gone up 3.2% per year since 2011, so real wages have really gone up. Further, tax data show a reasonably strong, robust growth since 2011 in the wages of salaried workers. So, you have data showing that incomes have gone up and therefore consumption has gone up.
JG:
It’s unfortunate that we have to keep disagreeing even on data, but there are so many different studies that looked into real wage data and show that real wages have grown by less than 1% per annum since 2017. And they have fallen for construction workers. What’s more important is that the increase in employment that has been celebrated in the latest PLFS in 202223 doesn’t actually exist because it’s generally due to the dramatic increase in unpaid family helpers. That is, people who work in family enterprises in unpaid forms. At the moment, the PLFS shows us that 37.5% of women workers are unpaid, which is an increase from 32% in 201112 and 201718. If you look at only the paid employment rate (that is, of people who are working and getting paid for their work), it’s only 48% for men and 13% for women. So, we really do not have any indications that real wage incomes are growing for most working families.
The National Sample Survey Organisation is showing us that real consumption grew at around 3% per annum. Yes, but what’s really happening here is a dramatically increased consumption of the top 10 to 15%, and this is widely documented. The fact is that whatever consumption we have is driven by the upper deciles. We also have many other indicators, like the demand for mass consumption goods and fastmoving consumer goods; they are hardly increasing. There is stagnation in demand for twowheelers; sales are less than they were predemonetisation (preNovember 2016).
GDP growth is now driven by capital expenditure, largely public capital expenditure, because we really haven’t seen the same revival in private investment, largely because mass consumption demand is stagnant.
We really do not have any indications that real wage incomes are growing for most working families
What do you have to say in response to the arguments made by critics about the unreliability of the government’s data? SB:
We need a larger discussion about the quality of private sector data. I’m particularly concerned about data from the CMIE (Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy) which show that female labour force participation rate in India is lower than that in Yemen and Iraq. This implies that only 9% of women are working in India. Second, regarding government data, we know that the 201718 consumer expenditure survey data were not released because of bad quality. The government should have released that data, but it doesn’t negate the fact that that data was of awful quality. The point is that the data offered by the private sector is perhaps much worse than government data.
JG:
I don’t agree because numbers in India now are politicised like never before. The consumer expenditure survey of 201718 was scrapped apparently because it was of poor quality, but we need to have the survey results and see what exactly was wrong. But look at the way the PLFS was not even released until after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Look at the attack [last year] on the head of the agency [the International