The Congress may be coy about admitting it, but the party’s firefighting over the damage done by the Planning Commission’s poverty line clearly has the stamp of Rahul Gandhi.
The Gandhi scion?s confidants, including rural development minister Jairam Ramesh, were at the forefront as the government sought to explain away the commission?s affidavit to the Supreme Court that an urban inhabitant spending more than R32 a day was above the poverty line.
Ramesh and Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairperson, Planning Commission, addressed a joint press conference on Monday to clarify the government’s position. They said that the poverty line was only a benchmark to measure economic development. This line, however, would not be a yardstick for determining the eligibility for the central government’s welfare schemes.
A new socio-economic caste survey would be used for the identification of the beneficiaries and a much larger segment of the population was expected to be covered by this, they said.
In a TV interview, Ahluwalia claimed that Rahul had not spoken to him on the matter. But the choice of the team put together to deliver the government’s response clearly belied the claim. While Ramesh shares Gandhi’s views on various matters, planning commission member Mihir Shah’s presence in the group was also significant. Shah, who heads an NGO, Samaj Pragati Sahyog, has worked extensively in Madhya Pradesh and is close to another Congress general secretary, Digvijaya Singh. Digvijaya is also known to be in Gandhi’s inner circle. Prior to firming up his statement on Monday, Ahluwalia is said to have held meetings with Shah, Narendra Jadhav, who is also a member of the National Advisory Council (NAC), and Soumitra Choudhary, a member of the Planning Commission. In fact, in a recent article in a weekly news magazine, Digvijaya Singh’s son, Jaivardhan Singh, was quoted as saying that he has enrolled in a formal orientation course on the challenges of policy formulation for rural development and project implementation under Shah.
Shah’s own credentials in rural policy issues are impeccable. For those in the Congress, much more than the cast of characters engaged in the firefight, the more heartening aspect has been the recognition that the poverty estimates could really damage the party even more than the 2G spectrum scam. ?Rahulji stepped in when it was necessary,? said on senior Congressman.