NEW DELHI: The government will soon revise the contentious poverty line upward from Rs 27.20 in rural areas and Rs 33.40 in urban areas after it receives the report of the Rangarajan committee that is examining the validity of the current yardstick.Minister of state for planning Rajeev Shukla told TOI the government was in the process of re-evaluating the poverty line in a bid to make it as comprehensive a measure of social and economic backwardness as possible.After both Congress and opposition leaders debunked expenditure of Rs 27 and Rs 33 per person per day as a benchmark for defining poverty, the government said the line had not been cast in stone."The poverty line is being reassessed. The Rangarajan committee is doing just that. In any case, the poverty line is not linked to pro-poor programmes like rural job guarantee or food security," Shukla said.The minister, however, insisted that the National Sample Survey Organization's findings clearly established that the pace at which poverty was decreasing had quickened. "It is a fact that poverty declined at 2.2% a year during UPA's tenure in office," he said.The problem for the government lies in the perception that Rs 27 and Rs 33 seem embarrassingly low consumption limits, particularly in the context of persistent high inflation India has been witnessing.The politically incorrect figures mean the government is unable to contend that incomes have risen and absolute or extreme poverty has declined. The rising wages of agriculture labour and a relative decline of starvation deaths point in this direction.Wary of being seen as callous in an election year, the government is set to revise the poverty line, but in the process it will dent its claim that 138 million people shed the below poverty line tag since UPA came to power in 2004.An upward revision of the poverty line carries the risk of millions of people slipping back into poverty in terms of an official head count and this is not a comfortable prospect for any government.The Tendulkar committee 's formulation continues to guide official calculations with the latest poverty line for 2011-12 indexed to inflation.The $1.25 a day calculation as a bare minimum expenditure amounts to Rs 75 at current rates and this measure will almost certainly push a large section of the population below the poverty line.It has been estimated 70% of Indians live on less than $2 a day but official sources contend that even if this is the case, observational and empirical evidence suggests that this is not translating into poverty on a massive scale.If poverty has declined, the relatively modest monthly per capita expenditure recorded by NSSO can mean that either incomes are not being correctly captured or living expenses of those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder are relatively low.Officials contend that the MPCE depicts all consumption, including that of the top layer of society with inflation-proof incomes. For those at the lower end of the scale, expenditure more or less equals incomes as they hardly save much. The MPCE of the lowest quarter may come close to reflecting actual per capita incomes.