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NEW DELHI: Data released by the Planning Commission on Monday showed that poverty had significantly declined between 2004-05 and 2009-10. The catch is that this decline is based on a poverty line that is even lower than the earlier Rs 32-per-day mark that had triggered an outrage when the government submitted it to the Supreme Court.

The new estimates are based on a poverty line that averages Rs 672.8 per month (Rs 22.43 per day) in rural areas and Rs 859.6 per month (Rs 28.65 per day) in urban areas for 2009-10. In a state like Delhi, the urban poverty line translates to Rs 34.67 per person per day.

In the Supreme Court, the government had submitted that the updated poverty line was likely to be Rs 26 per day in rural areas and Rs 32 per day in the towns in June 2011.

As things stand, a host of centrally sponsored social security schemes for the poor exclude those above these poverty lines from availing of the benefits under the schemes.

By the lowered benchmarks, poverty across the country declined by 7.3 percentage points from 37.2% in 2004-05 to 29.8% in 2009-10. In absolute terms, there were 35.5 crore poor people in 2009-10 against 40.7 crore five years earlier.

MGNREGS, higher wages help reduce poverty level

Officials said the sharp decline in poverty between 2004-05 and 2009-10-rural poverty going down by 8 percentage points from 41.8% to 33.8% and urban poverty by 4.8 percentage points from 25.7% to 20.9% – had been aided by high growth, hike in wages and implementation of key schemes like the MGNREGS.

“It is largely due to better agriculture growth and improvement in livelihood,” a senior plan panel official said. According to Crisil, the sharp increase in wages which was near simultaneous across income groups in urban and rural India since 2004-05 boosted consumption demand. Urban and rural wages rose by 12.0-14.0 % over 2004-05 to 2009-10, compared to an increase of 7% in the previous five-year period. Increases in income were especially sharp after 2007-08.

However, the poverty picture is extremely patchy with some states showing sharp reductions in the proportion of the BPL population while many others saw little or no change and five states in the north-east saw a larger percentage of their populations slipping below the mark. The poverty ratio in Himachal, MP, Maharashtra, Orissa, Sikkim, TN and Uttarakhand has declined by 10 percentage points or more. But in Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland, poverty ratios in 2009-10 are higher than in ’04-05. The data showed Bihar, Chhattisgarh and UP have shown only marginal decline in poverty ratio, particularly in rural areas. Given the size of UP and Bihar and the fact the base is already low, this is a worrying sign.

Orissa, which had the highest poverty headcount ratio (57%) in 2004-5, has brought the proportion of poor down to 37% as per the new benchmark. Bihar (53.5%), Chhattisgarh (48.7%) and Manipur (47.1%) now have the three worst poverty headcount ratios. Applying the Tendulkar methodology, on which these figures are based, to 1993-94 data shows that Himachal has been the fastest at reducing poverty, bringing the proportion of people under the poverty line to 9.5%, less than a third of its 1993-4 numbers.

In rural areas, STs showed the highest level of poverty (47.4%), followed by SCs (42.3%), and OBCs (31.9%), against 33.8% for all classes. Among religious groups, Sikhs have the lowest poverty in rural areas (11.9%) while in urban areas, Christians have the lowest proportion (12.9%) of poor.

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NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court will hear the Centre’s plea for review of the Vodafone judgment on Tuesday at a time when the UPA government has proposed to amend the Income Tax Act to levy capital gains tax on domestic asset acquisition through merger and acquisition deals involving overseas companies.

The petition seeking review of the January 20 judgment quashing the I-T department’s Rs 11,000 crore capital gains tax demand on Vodafone is listed in-chamber before a bench of Chief Justice S H Kapadia and Justices K S Radhakrishnan and Swatanter Kumar.

Under normal practice, the in-chamber scrutiny of review petitions by judges takes place without the presence of lawyers from any side. Majority of the review petitions are dismissed but there have been recent examples where the court decided to hear pleas from lawyers by listing the plea for reconsideration in open court.

The hard-hitting 100-page review petition, filed jointly by the Centre and the I-T department, has listed 121 grounds, each pointing to an error in judgment. The government said it was surprised by the SC’s decision to give relief to Vodafone on the ground that the offshore transaction was a structured foreign direct investment into the country when not a single penny had come as investment into India through the deal.

Smarting under the Vodafone ruling, finance minister Pranab Mukherjee in his budget proposals had indicated major amendments in direct tax laws with retrospective effect to allow the government to tax income “accruing or arising directly or indirectly through the transfer of capital asset situated in India”.

The Finance Bill has proposed that notwithstanding any judgment from the apex court or any tribunal, the retrospective amendments would enable the government to keep alive all its tax demands and not return anything which it had collected as levy pursuant to the proposed change in law.

The two budget proposals on tax front are aimed at mopping up Rs 35-40,000 crore, which is now locked up in litigation between government and companies. As a result, investors both domestic and foreign will be closely tracking the outcome of the apex court’s decision on the Vodafone review petition.

The review petition said, “The judgment has far-reaching consequences as much as it undermines the existing and regulatory framework that requires approvals from competent authorities in India even for transactions routed outside India through tax havens. The apex court failed to appreciate the consequences of its judgment on the steps taken by the government of India to promote tax transparency and fight tax evasion.

“The apex court failed to appreciate that the instant case did not involve any inflow of monies into India because the sale consideration was admittedly paid outside India by VIH, a British Virgin Island company, to HTIL. Therefore, it was not a case of FDI into India.”

Vodafone had taken note of the review plea and said it would be “evaluated by the same bench that ruled on the Vodafone-Hutchison case” and that the company had no further comments to make at this stage. On January 20, the Supreme Court clearly and unambiguously ruled that there was no tax to pay on the Vodafone-Hutchison transaction, it had said.

Justice Kapadia had said in the judgment that the transaction was a “bona fide structured FDI investment into India, which fell outside India’s territorial tax jurisdiction… consequently, the Indian tax authority had no territorial tax jurisdiction to tax the said offshore transaction”.

dhananjay.mahapatra@timesgroup.com

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