Excel poverty

Excelitis – A disease that afflicts computer literate numerates.

It is obvious from the sterile debates and discussions in the media on the percentage of poor people in India that Excelitis is endemic here. How else would you justify the newly drawn poverty lines: Rs. 22.42 per day per person in rural areas and Rs. 28.35 in urban?

Do we not remember, and should the government not have remembered that 25 paise is the lowest denomination of currency (coins) that is legal tender? What does Rs. 22.42 really mean? 89 coins of 25 paise, and 17 paise to be donated. Rs. 28.35 – a princely figure this is, 113 coins of 25 paise, and 10 paise to be donated. The whole thing is progressive you see – the more you get, the less you donate.

Sure, ever since poverty levels have been monetized we have had paise staring at us. But, earlier those paise were meaningful They were legal tenders. The point is as the lower limit of legal tender goes north, should poverty levels be appropriately rounded off to the next higher legally tenderable amount? Rs. 22.42 to Rs. 22.50 and Rs. 28.35 to Rs. 28.50.

I know, those increases of 8 and 15 paise for the rural and urban citizen respectively is not going to matter. And, that is precisely my point. When apparent precision is not going to matter, why cling on to it?

Here comes Excelitis. Gone are the days when you sit down and punch numbers on calculators, repeatedly. God forbid, if you made a mistake, you go back to square one.

Now it is MS Excel, universally and exclusively. All it takes is entering the number once, and only once. The results tumble out, in double precision (but not necessarily accurate). And, this suits the policy makers. In its detail working of the numbers, the government relies on working backwards from the fixed targets. For example, the outgo on poverty alleviation, including PDF, MGNREGS etc. is fixed at this many tens of thousands of crore rupees (this is not a big sum, please remember).

This total amount is divvied up amongst the programs, and it so happens that the outgo on BPL account to match its allocation, the rural poverty has to be defined at Rs. 22.42 per person per day. Given the number of poor people, say 40% of about 70% of the total population (say, 34 crore), even a single paisa increase will burst the budget and upset the finance apple cart. No go. Just imagine doing this calculation without MS Excel! You just cannot.

If you care to know, poverty was defined as below 2,100 Kcal per day in urban areas and 2,400 in rural areas. This was supposedly a concession to rural workers, a higher level of manual input, including carrying human excreta on the head. But now, it is a uniform 1,800 Kcal per day per person, urban and rural (Human shit got discounted!). This shows how much concerned the government is about obesity.

This number 1,800 Kcal per day per person, I am sure, came out of another Excel sheet, all in one Excel book, interlinked. You have the upper bound of allocation, the lower bound of Kcal accounting of poverty and Bingo! you know the number of poor people you can accommodate in your budget. Presto! You got Rs. 22.42 for the rural poor and Rs. 28.35 for the urban poor.

What surprises me is that everything I have said is in the open. It is all so simple, particularly when you have MS Office suite of programs on your laptop. Yet, there is not a word of it in the media discourses.

Go figure!

Raghuram Ekambaram