With 30 crore poor people in India, the number of poor has barely changed over the last three decades. According to 11th Five year Plan, total number of poor people counted 32.13 crore in 1973, 32.29 crore in 1983, 32.03 crore in 1993-94 and 30.17 crore in 2004-05. This means the number of poor in the country has declined between 1993-94 and 2004-05 by roughly two crore. Even after sixty years of independence, over a quarter of our population still remains poor. However, the country has successfully reduced the share of the poor in the population from 54.8 in 1973 to 27.5 in 2004. There is growing consensus that the poverty line in the country, which is Rs 356 monthly per capita consumption expenditure for rural areas and Rs 458 for urban areas in 2004-05, is much too low. If the poverty line was higher, the share of the population below the poverty line would be accordingly higher. Among those States, where absolute numbers of the poor has increased between 1973 and 2004-05 include Uttar Pradesh (535.7 lakh to 590 lakh) Rajasthan (28.5 lakh to 134.9 lakh), Maharashtra (287.4 lakh) to 317.3 lakh) and Nagaland (2.9 lakh to 3.9 lakh). Total number of poor has also increased in Madhya Pradesh and Chhatisgarh taken together from 276 lakh to 340 lakh; and in Bihar and Jharkhand from 370 lakh to 485 lakh during this period. Those States where the overall number of poor has remained roughly constant include Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Orissa and Mizoram. However, some of the States have succeeded in reducing number of poor in rural areas during this period. These include Andhra Pradesh (178.2 lakh to 64.7 lakh); Karnataka (128.4 lakh to 75 lakh); Kerala (111.3 lakh to 32.4 lakh); Tamil Nadu (172.6 lakh to 76.5 lakh and West Bengal (257.9 lakh to 173.2 lakh). Overall, the number of poor in rural areas in the country as a whole has declined from 2612 lakh in 1973 to 2209 lakh in 2004-05, by just 403 lakh people over a 20 year period. That means the rate of decline in the numbers of the poor has been 20.1 lakh per year. But in urban areas the number of the poor has gone up from 600.4 lakh to 807.9 lakh during this period. The number of poor has marginally declined in rural areas, and increased inurban areas over last three decades. This suggests that to escape rural poverty, the poor from rural areas migrate to urban areas. In fact, the total number of migrant workers in India in 1999-2000 was a staggering 10.27 crore. The number of seasonal or cyclical migrants in India may be 2 crore or so. But migration, both rural-rural (from relatively poor to relatively richer States and districts) and rural-urban, has the effect of leaving the poor without a safety net. The composition of the poor has been changing and rural poverty has been getting concentrated in the agricultural labour and artisan households and urban poverty in the casual labour households. The share of agricultural labour households, which accounted for 41 per cent of rural poor in 1993-94 increased to 47 per cent in 1999-2000, according to NSS 2004-05. In contrast, the share of self-employed in agriculture among the rural poor had fallen from 33 per cent to 28 per cent. Casual labour households accounted for 32 per cent of the urban population living in poverty in 1999-2000, increasing from 25 per cent in 1993-94. Among the social groups, scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and backward castes accounted for 81 per cent of the rural poor. In 2004-05, while the head count ratio of the poor in the total rural population was 28 per cent, among the scheduled castes it was 36.8 per cent. In urban areas, the head count ratio overall was 25.6 per cent but among SCs it will even higher in rural areas at nearly 40 per cent. The proportion of scheduled tribe population among the rural population living in poverty has increased from 14.8 per cent in 1993-94 to 17.5 per cent in 1999-2000