PKR vice-president N Surendran has taken Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak to task for claiming in the government's transformation report that the poverty rate in the country has successfully been reduced to a mere 1.7 percent.

NONE Calling this claim, “incredible, baseless and a blatant fraud”, Surendran ( right ) claimed that the real poverty rate in Malaysia is a whopping 19 percent of all households, which amounted to 5.5 million Malaysians.

“Najib's absurdly small figure of 1.7 percent is contradicted by the clear evidence of widespread poverty in poor urban and rural areas throughout the country.

“With prices rising and wages stagnant, Najib's claim makes neither statistical nor common sense. His claim defies the empirical evidence of rampant poverty all around us,” Surendran said in a statement issued today.

He was referring to the PM’s claim last night, which Najib highlighted when presenting the National Transformation Programme's Annual Report for 2012.

Meanwhile, Surendran claimed the figure derived by PKR is accurate, believable and “matches the ground reality”.

NONE PKR, he explained, utilised an internationally-accepted methodology of calculating poverty rate, basing it on half of a median household income.

This, he said, was based on the Department of Statistics’ own 2009 Household Income and Basic Amenities Survey Report.

“In an advanced country like Japan, the reported poverty rate is 15.7 per cent; how can it be a mere 1.7 percent in Malaysia?” he asked.

According to Surendran further, this reflected the failure of the PM’s Economic Transformation Programme (ETP), which only served to enrich BN cronies while leaving millions of people poor.

He said the government is morally obligated to alleviate and eradicate the “massive, debilitating and painful affliction” of poverty, without resorting to statistical manipulation.