Re-conceptualising poverty
The current thinking in the national Planning Commission to redefine poverty to include attributes that reflect deprivation has the potential to facilitate effective state intervention to reach the elusive goal of poverty eradication. For decades, Indian estimates ignored the multi-dimensional nature of poverty, held a bias towards calorific-computation, and restricted the measure to reflect economic deprivation at a very basic level. It was not just that this presented a narrow picture of the nation