SEEN from the harsh, real world of the urban poor, the paper realm of dry statistical models would seem planets away. The irony is, this is an accurate map of the distance from the other end too. After innumerable studies, we still have no fix on the number of urban poor in India. And so, despite the sprawling slums that patch our cities, their inhabitants are routinely left out of the ambit of the safety net that covers the rural poor. It's a story desperate for some updates, and it's finally getting them. More than one, in fact. The whole number game hinges on the criteria applied. Two recent studies, by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, raised the poverty measure from a daily earning of $1 per person to $1.25 and $1.35 respectively. The World Bank benchmark is the estimated cost for buying food worth 2,100 calories, deemed the minimum daily requirement for an adult. Judging by this, India is home to one-third of the global poor. Though this created the desired flutter, the debate finally swung to the exact mode for measuring poverty or to judge welfare programmes. An attempt to come up with a brand new template or "vulnerability atlas" to identify the urban poor is now being launched in India. This will be based on redrawn parameters that look beyond the income criterion. Instead of purchasing power, the usual index, accessibility of public services will be taken as the prime indicator. The Office of the Commissioners to the Supreme Court, the Planning Commission, the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (nceus) and ngos have set up a panel to carry it out. The template is being put to test in Delhi and the study is expected to be completed in a month. Rashmi Singh, director, Convergence of Social Services, which is working on the new poverty atlas, says the survey attempts to gauge the vulnerability factor for the first time. "We have looked at models adopted by states like Kerala before reworking our model and concluded that a non-income criteria could be appropriate for determining the numbers," says Singh. The income criterion tends to suppress figures for the urban poor. While Delhi has one of India's highest per capita incomes (Rs 66,728 per annum, against the national average of Rs 29,642), it also has close to 15 lakh poor people, a figure that gets masked in the high averages. Once the survey is complete, Vijay Dev, Delhi's commissioner for food & supplies, reckons, the figure is likely to rise to 50 lakh. This is because proxy indicators such as social vulnerability and access to public services will be used to calculate income. Says former bureaucrat Harsh Mander, a court-appointed commissioner associated with the study: "The experience of the urban poor is different from that of the rural poor. In rural areas there is a support system, but the sheer brutal character of urban poverty, with people living in utterly degraded conditions, makes us wonder whether the state is attempting to drive the poor out." The new methodology, therefore, proposes that the primary indicator that should be used to identify poverty should not solely be the place of residence. This, as Rashmi Singh says, "will then make the poor eligible for various welfare schemes launched by the government from time to time." It is usually assumed that the city's poor reside in the slums. However, in reality there is no such boundary condition and someone who isn't a slum resident should not automatically be excluded from accessing benefits that are meant for the poor. The second indicator guages vulnerability through occupation. "Occupational vulnerable groups