An important point is that the concentration of the poor around the poverty cutoffs is so high that a slightly higher poverty cutoff can produce an enormous increase in their numbers. I don’t want to be unkind as Tendulkar is not around but using the urban consumption basket of the poor for rural India and delinking the cutoff from nutritional considerations were deliberately designed to keep the numbers low. An attempt was also made to show that the national poverty cutoff was close to the World Bank poverty cutoff of $1.25 to give it greater credibility. I strongly opposed this and the parity was omitted. Even if coincidental, the parity would have made little sense as the $1.25 cutoff was determined as the median of the poverty cutoffs of the 15 poorest countries in the world from which India was excluded. Yes, this was done in the past too, as reconciliation of poverty estimates with those of the calorie-deficient led to awkward results. And just to illustrate my point about juggling of the nsso data, under (late) Prof Praveen Visaria, the recall period was reduced from a month to a week and that led to a dramatic drop in poverty (this was the 1999 nsso ‘thick’ round). Not just the poverty estimates but also the entire nsso round were later junked.