NEW DELHI: Poverty has declined in India by a satisfactory 7.4 percent between 2006 and 2010, according to the country's Planning Minister, Ashwani Kumar. Interestingly, Kumar, who presented the figures in the Indian Parliament, admitted that the figures were based on the poverty line level of per capita daily consumption worth $ 0.5 which civil society and several politicians have slammed repeatedly as being farcical. In the North-Eastern region, poverty fell only in the state of Tripura where it reduced by 22.6 percent, but it increased in other insurgency-hit states of the region such as Nagaland, Mizoram, Assam and Manipur. Among India's bigger state's, the impoverished Orissa, which is often hit by floods and droughts besides cyclones due to its location on the turbulent east coast, shed over 20 per cent from its poor population, the highest fall among major states. Even in the national capital of New Delhi, the number of people living below the poverty line rose by 1.2 percent. In Gujarat, it fell by 8.6 percent and in another state known for poverty, Bihar, it fell by 0.9 per cent. In the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, poverty declined by 3.2 per-cent and in Andhra Pradesh, another state on the east coast prone to fall victim to harsh climate, poverty fell by 8.5 per cent. According to the minister, the country's poverty ration has come down from 37.2 per cent in 2005 to 29.8 per cent in 2010, declining nationally at a healthy rate of 1.5 percentage points every year in this five-year period.
