Patna,(BiharTimes): “We may try and study actual lives of the ordinary families, poor as well as not so poor, and see how they cope with shocks. Poor families are as different from each other as the rest of us. Reducing all to a number may be convenient for bureaucracy to publish statistics, but lives can be bettered only by understanding in detail how those lives are lived. We do not know enough about how the poor cope with and survive despite many vicissitudes.” These views were expressed by Lord Meghnad Desai, an eminent economist and writer, while delivering the ADRI Foundation Lecture today on “Can Poverty Ever Be Abolished?”

Lord Desai, who is associated with the London School of Economics, said that “we have had many debates about how to define poverty. India has had an ongoing National Sample Survey of family expenditure wherein there is a poverty level based on a calorific count standard (later augmented by Suresh Tendulkar) which gives us the head count of poverty.”

He said estimates of the poverty rate in India can range from 22 up to 80 percent depending on whether “you take Tendulkar, World Bank or Arjun Sengupta as your measuring rod.”