37% of India now below poverty line

States are demanding a bigger central share in funds to alleviate poverty. The Suresh Tendulkar committee, in its report submitted to the Planning Commission last week, has estimated that 37% of the country’s total population is under the poverty line; of this, nearly 42% live in rural areas. The existing official poverty estimates are 27.5% for the whole of India and 28.3% for rural areas. The Tendulkar committee had broad-based the definition of poverty to factor in life denominators like health and education.