NEW DELHI: How many poor people does India have? During the United Progressive Alliance government ’s tenure, the number was put at 363 million, or about 30% of the country’s 1.2 billion population. That number could see a big jump, with the NITI Aayog likely to suggest a blanket 40% cutoff, dropping the controversial expenditure criterion.That would put the number of poor in India at about 484 million, two senior government officials told ET on condition of anonymity. The statistic carries a heavy political charge, as the UPA discovered to its cost. And, citing a higher number may be an advantage to any government seeking to burnish its pro-poor credentials and battling allegations of crony capitalism, analysts said.A 14-member task force headed by NITI Aayog vice chairman Arvind Panagariya is contemplating the 40% mark based on 2011 data from the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO). The task force is expected to submit its report to PM Modi in June."While the task force is looking at various measures, there is a near majority on fixing a relatively realistic proportion of the population as poor and keeping this consistent over a period of time so as to be able to track the growth process downward," said one of the officials who was at the first meeting of the task force last month. The government wants to use the estimate for purely analytical purposes, with NSSO numbers being revised every five years, said the second official, who was also present at the meeting.This will help the government gauge whether social sector schemes are reaching the poor and help avoid the kind of controversy that broke out when the poverty line was defined on the basis of daily per capita expenditure.The poverty line carries significance as a large number of social sector schemes are directed toward those below it.This suggests that if it’s lowered too much, many deserving sections get left out. Too high and many that don’t need it also come into the net, adding to costs. The Suresh Tendulkar committee sought to broaden the definition of poverty and stipulated a benchmark daily per capita expenditure of Rs 27 in rural areas and Rs Rs 33 in urban locations in 2011-12, arriving at a cutoff of 22% of the population, which sparked a furious row as critics said the numbers were unrealistic.The C Rangarajan committee was set up to review this and raised the limit to Rs 32 and Rs 47 for rural and urban areas respectively, putting the mark at 30%. That 2014 report also didn’t assuage critics and it wasn’t accepted by the Narendra Modi government, which set up another panel to estimate poverty in the country and suggest measures to alleviate it.