1 in 4 Kashmir denizen lives on less than a Dollar a day

According to statistics kept under wraps by the state government, around 25 per cent of Jammu and Kashmir’s population lives below the poverty line, nearly two-thirds of them Muslims. In view of the Planning Commission’s recent controversial cut-off line, the data would suggest that one in every four citizens of the state subsists on just over Rs 30 (less than a dollar) a day, or even less. Despite a poverty graph comparable to some of the worst scenarios in India, Kashmir’s rulers and officialdom seemed to have given a wide berth to the UN-designated World Poverty Eradication Day today, with no mention either of the gravity of the issue in the state, or the fate of a plethora of central programmes allegedly meant for the economic uplift of the underprivileged classes. In work rarely done by any state agency here on the state’s developmental indices, a report by the directorate of economics and statistics in 2007-08 had put the number of people below the poverty line in Jammu and Kashmir’s urban areas at 2,21,000. The figure is said to be far greater in rural areas. The Srinagar city, currently witnessing an era of unprecedented glitzy prosperity with proliferating commercial complexes and swanky automobiles, is said to have around 73,262 people living below the poverty line. A government survey has put the incidence of poverty among the state’s Muslims at 17.76 per cent, among Hindus at 4.63 per cent, among Buddhists at 0.20 per cent, among Sikhs at 0.08 per cent, and among Christians at 0.01 per cent.