LookAtVietnam – The Social Affairs Ministry has instructed its local offices to provide accurate, updated statistics on poor families before November 20, 2009.

Poverty is defined as a per capita income of less than 200,000 dong per month for rural residents and less than 260,000 dong per month for city-dwellers.

Local labor departments must re-tally needy households to rectify errors in previous statistics. MoLISA says that this task has not been carried out properly and resulted in mistakes in government subsidy allocations for the poor during the 2009 Tet (New Year) holiday in February.

In many locations, government officials at the commune level and well-off families reportedly were allowed to retain prior designations as poverty-stricken and received government assistance. Meanwhile, many poor people did not receive this aid or received less than they deserved.

According to current poverty statistics, Vietnam has around 2.2 million poor families, over 10 million people in all. ‘Poverty’ is defined as a per capita income of less than 200,000 dong per month for rural residents and less than 260,000 dong per month for city-dwellers.

VietNamNet/VNE