The planning commission estimates on poverty, showing that the number of the poor has gone down, hav come in for criticism from civil society groups.

“It is a selective reading of data. The government would love to read the data that matches its political vision of public relations exercise rather than data which is telling the truth. India doesn’t have a data deficit but there is a deficit in reading the data objectively and real findings of the data without the blinkers of politics,” says Biraj Swain, national campaigns manager of Oxfam India.

“Had it been just a statistical exercise, one could have tolerated it but for the matter of fact, these exercises are directly linked to social security programmes and entitlements of the poor. It is basically a joke by the government,” Swain added.

Biraj Patnaik, a principal advisor to the supreme court's commissionerson on the right to food, termed the government's poverty estimate as its self-goal which had no relevance to poverty alleviation.

“There was no need to announce the data or create a controversy out of it. What is needed at this stage for the planning commission is to reaffirm that the poverty line would not be used for linking with any schemes. The time has come to delink all the existing programmes including the food security bill [from such estimates],” says Patnaik.

How can someone survive for a day on such figures (Rs 28 in urban areas and Rs 22.5 in rural areas), he said.

NC Saxena, an influential member of the national advisory council (NAC), termed the poverty line as dog line -- only cat and dog can live at such low expenditure. “We should worry about how 35 crore people are below this line and surviving, how are they living, in what conditions”, said Saxena.

“If you see inter-state data, there is a great deal of confusion. No decline of poverty in Chhattisgarh but a great decline in Madhya Pradesh. If you see Chhattisgarh, the public delivery system (PDS) is working very well,” pointed out the NAC member.

Facing criticism from different quarters, the government has decided to set up a new committee to revise the Tendulkar committee's methodology to estimate the incidence on poverty.