 56 million Indians slipped below the poverty line in 2020 because of Covid and that's what the World Bank's latest poverty report says. But when it comes to poverty numbers, the World Bank is the last institution you should believe. Why? Because of two reasons. Number one is the ridiculously low poverty threshold that the World Bank takes, which is currently $2.15. Now you'd say that's not less. In fact, I've seen some newspapers and websites say $2.15 is about 175 rupees today. This is completely wrong because what the World Bank uses is what is called a Purchasing Power Parity Dollar. And right now it uses the 2017 Purchasing Power Parity or PPP Dollar, which makes $2.15 about 44 Indian rupees. That's what it is. Now 44 Indian rupees per day is hardly enough to even feed a person in India, leave alone, take care of their other expenses. So you can understand that the World Bank's estimates of poverty are ridiculously low. The number of poor people in any poor country in India are much higher than what the World Bank estimates. Because this very low poverty line threshold is actually based on the poverty line, official poverty line of the 15 poorest countries, most of them in Africa. And as we know that most of these countries probably have a low threshold to make it look like that they don't have that many poor people. Just as in India we say that the threshold in India, official threshold that used to be used is very low, artificially low to reduce the number of poor people in India. Statistically reduce it. Now why does the World Bank want to do that? I'm going to come to that later, but before that let me come to number two. The reason that we should take the latest data with a pinch of salt. The World Bank says that the reason that estimating the poverty levels in India is difficult is because the government has not come out with any poverty figures since 2012-11. And the 2017 estimate was withdrawn on the basis that there were some problems with the data. Now what can the World Bank do? It takes data from the private agency CMI or the Centre for Monitoring India's economy which I have used regularly in my videos. And they have taken their CPHS survey which covers about 1.5 lakh families every week and they have taken that data to project what the poverty levels are in India. The poverty ratio is in India. But there is a catch here. First World Bank correctly says that CPHS data or CMI's data is different from NSS or the government's data, the National Sample Survey's data because they use two different methodologies. So there are two ways in which one can use it. The first or approach one as the World Bank's report calls it, approach one is to take the methodology used in NSS and project it to CMI. The second one which it says is the most accurate way is to take the methodology used in CMI and project it to NSS. But because of lack of data, World Bank chooses the first method which it says could end up undercounting the number of poor. It might underestimate the impact of the shock of COVID-19. So number one, remember this is the first reason why that 56 million number might actually be lower than what actually happened because of COVID. The number two reason is that the World Bank has removed all of CMI's phone surveys. Now during the lockdown, CMI basically did all its surveys by telephones for a short period of time. Out of the total number of surveys it did about 5.2% came from telephonic surveys. And the interesting thing is that CMI has been criticized earlier for you doing these telephonic surveys because people have said that this actually represents relatively affluent workers because they have telephones. They have phones with them. They have mobile phones so they might end up being more affluent. So it is possible that it undercounts the poor. But the World Bank says that essentially telephone surveys always overcount poverty. And they've given the estimate or some study done in an African country to show why telephonic surveys are not reliable because they overcount poverty. They don't undercount it. So by removing these what has happened? World Bank removes the telephonic surveys from CMI's surveys and says that the poverty level and the justice poverty level is 14.3%. But if it includes the telephonic surveys then the poverty level would go up to 17.8%. What does that mean in the actual number of people? It means that instead of 56 million people having slipped into under the poverty line, the actual number could well be above 100 million. So the World Bank's estimate is actually lower than what the real poverty impact might have been. But that is only one part of the story. I'll come back to the point about why I'm saying that the World Bank always tries to underestimate poverty in the world. The reason is from the 1990s the World Bank has forced countries across the world to adopt neoliberal economic policies which in India have been called LPG reforms. A liberalization, privatization and globalization, deregulation making it easier for private entrepreneurs to open businesses wherever they want, privatizing public assets and globalizing or allowing foreign capital into the country, whether bringing goods into the country or bringing capital into the country. This is what was imposed on nations across the world including India in 1991 when India went to get a loan from IMF and World Bank. Declassified documents from 2010 actually show that these conditions were imposed. Now the World Bank therefore wants to show that from 1990 global poverty has reduced sharply. And that is what it says from 1990 to 2019 before the COVID period global poverty dropped sharply using that same low threshold limit that it uses without raising it for standard of living which should have been done in any case. But what it doesn't tell you that if you actually take out China then most of this global poverty reduction would go away. And China has nothing to do with what IMF and World Bank have to say to the world. Number two, if you raise this level to $2.5 and remove China, increase the threshold to $2.5 and in today's purchasing parity term that would be about $2.8, remove China then between 1990 to 2015, the global poverty level would have remained exactly the same and not gone down. And also if you remove China and the Asia Pacific and raise the threshold to $5.5 which is about 80 rupees or 80 odd rupees in 2011 PPP which is the comparable number then global poverty would have increased from $2 billion to $2.6 billion between 1990 to 2015. That is the impact of the policies imposed by World Bank and IMF across the world. That is the reason why the World Bank wants to blame COVID and not the policies it has imposed on the world. It admits that from 2015 to 2019 also poverty alleviation was slowing down. So it wants to blame COVID and say everything was fine, continue with these policies but bring in some safeguards like increased taxes a little bit, increased fiscal spending on infrastructure, on health, on education. But it does not say that the government should start entering the economy. And it also says remove subsidies, replace subsidies with direct targeted cash transfer. These are typical World Bank policies which have failed across the world but it still wants to push and it's using COVID as an excuse. That's the show today. Keep watching NewsClick. Like this video. Share it as well.