Letters: Poor show

Your edit “Facts, not outrage” (March 22) while making the perfectly valid point that the past five to ten years have seen “the fastest rate of poverty reduction in India’s history” – and that this deserves applause and not criticism – overlooks two points.

The first is that it is the job of the opposition and the media in a vibrant democracy to find every opportunity to embarrass the government and put pressure on it to do even better — even when it is already doing well in some respects. The second point is that the current poverty line is indeed absurd. One does understand that when the poverty level was actually between 75 and 85 per cent, the government and the Planning Commission of that time did not want to say so. But now that things are at a more reasonable level, should we as a nation not face the hard reality?

The time has indeed come for the Planning Commission offices to be shifted from elitist New Delhi to non-air-conditioned premises in all of the 600-plus district headquarters in India so as to bring to the decision makers in the central government the not-so-pleasant realities of “Bharat” at the block, gram panchayat and village levels.

Alok Sarkar, Kolkata

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