Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar inaugurates the international conference on poverty at AN Sinha Institute, Patna, on Friday. Picture by Deepak Kumar

Patna, July 20: Inaugurating a three-day international seminar called: “Revisiting poverty issue: Measurement, identification and eradication”, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar today conceded that every state family should earn at least Rs 5,000 per month to live a life with some dignity.

Perhaps, he was the first chief minister to concede that Bihar has a larger population of poor people then assessed by the national survey.

This is the second major seminar here after the global meet early this year.

Today, Nitish Kumar began his talk by thanking Prime Minister for deliberating exclusively on agriculture and energy recently, and asked social scientists, economists and policy-makers alike, to help the state extend benefits to the poorest of the poor.

Kumar emphasised that the fresh BPL survey, currently underway, would reveal that there are no less than one crore poor families in Bihar, whereas the Centre’s data put it at 65 lakh (according to BPL 13-point poverty denominators).

Rajya Sabha member and chairman of National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector Arjun Sengupta conceded that the CM was probably right.

He said national statistics revealed that 87.82 per cent of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe, 79.85 per cent of OBCs and 84.4 per cent of Muslims fell under the classical “poor” category.

Sengupta dittoed the chief minister as he asked: “Who are the poor? How can we identify them when we have not eradicated poverty?”

The three-day seminar concluding on July 22 would be attended by Rakhi Bhattacharya of the Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies (Calcutta), professor of international studies and social scientist at Cornell Kaushik Basu, Amitabh Kundu professor at JNU and development economist P. Antony.

Richard Palmer-Jones from School of Development Studies, Angia-UK and World Bank economist Peter Lanjouw would make special presentations on poverty measurement and income inequality.