Aquarter of Indians to live on 1.25 dollars per day in 2015: World Bank

India now is ahead of only Sub-Saharan Africa among developing countries in terms of the percentage of population below the poverty line, though it fared better than China on this count in 1990, according to the World Bank.

The multilateral lender, in its recently released report ‘Global Economic Prospects for 2009’, said a quarter of India’s population will be living in extreme poverty, on less than $1.25 a day, in 2015.

The corresponding figures for China is 6.1% and for Sub-Saharan Africa 37.1%. These are based on purchasing power parity exchange rates derived from the 2005 price surveys, meaning that the calculations have been made assuming a dollar’s purchasing power to be the same in the years under consideration as in 2005.

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India ready to buy 10 dollars billion International Monetary Fund bonds

The government would prefer to buy bonds worth $10 billion as its contribution towards increasing the capital base of the International Monetary Fund by $500 billion announced at the G-20 meeting in London early this month.

India is ready to buy about $10 billion (around Rs 50,000 crore) of IMF bonds, a media report said quoting Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia. “If the IMF can issue the securities, it's an easy way for us to make a contribution,” said Ahluwalia, who is in the US to attend the Spring Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank.

Leaders of G-20 countries have committed to increase the resource base of the IMF by half a trillion dollars. India has maintained that it would contribute as per its quota in the Fund. “Since India’s share is close to 2% in the Fund, it results in it contributing $10 billion (2% of $500 billion) to expand IMF’s resource base,” a senior government official said here.

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Monday Blues

In what could further sully the image of an Indian IT sector still coming to grips with the Satyam fraud, the World Bank announced in Washington late on Sunday that it had barred Wipro Technologies from contracts under its corporate procurement programme until 2011. Two other companies were also barred: the beleaguered Satyam Computer Services and a relatively smaller company, Megasoft Consultants.

The Bank also intends to publicly list all companies that have been barred from its corporate procurement to ensure fairness and transparency, it said. The World Bank said it had imposed the ban from 2007 because Wipro offered shares during its US IPO in 2000 to Bank employees.

The BSE IT index fell by 3.80% on news of the Wipro ban.However, a statement by Wipro saying earnings from the World Bank were negligible and that the ban been issued in 2007 assuaged the woes of traders.

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World Bank sees United States recession risk

The United States may well be heading into a recession and Europe faces further financial market turmoil too but developing countries are showing little signs of being hurt, World Bank President Robert Zoellick said.

"I am not an economic forecaster. People are debating: Is it going to be a slowdown or recession?," Zoellick told Reuters. "Regardless of that debate, you are facing a serious economic slowdown from what you had before, and there may very well be a recession," he said, referring to the US economy. Further fallout is likely from the squeeze in credit markets that forced US in vestment bank Bear Stearns to seek emergency financing last week, Zoellick said in an interview during the Brussels Forum conference on trans atlantic relations.

"In financial markets in the United States, there is still a lot to go," he said, speaking on Saturday. Europe too was likely to see sub prime mortage-related problems beyond those which affected German banks recently. "My own view (is that) there is more to be worked through in the European market too," said Zoellick, a former US trade representative who also held top Treasury and State Department post.

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