BEIJING: The number of Chinese eligible for special poor relief has tripled to more than 43 million after the government raised the official poverty line in October, state media reported yesterday.

Before the new benchmark kicked in, 14.8 million Chinese were considered to earn below the poverty line, set at 785 yuan (S$165) a year. But that number soared after the government hiked the threshold to 1,067 yuan, the China Daily said.

The poverty line is the minimum level of income considered by the government to be necessary to obtain enough basic goods and services to subsist.

Raising the poverty line means that more people will be covered by China's poverty relief schemes, according to the report. The central government has a budget of 16.7 billion yuan for relief programmes this year, 2.3 billion yuan more than last year, it said.

The poverty line could be raised further next October, largely because migrant workers who are laid off and forced to return home amid the economic slowdown could slip back into poverty, the report said.

Also China's rising cost of living makes raising of the poverty line necessary, the Caijing magazine reported last Friday.

Mr Liu Fuhe, a senior official with the national Poverty Alleviation Office, said China's poverty population, according to the World Bank's definition of extreme poverty - living on less than US$1 (S$1.45) per day - probably exceeded 100 million.

China first announced a poverty line in 1985, with people making less than 200 yuan a year deemed to be living in poverty, and it has increased the threshold gradually since then.

Beijing is also planning for a social security number system which would enable it to monitor better all the insurance funds in the country.

The draft of the social insurance law, which said each Chinese citizen's current identification card number would be his or her social security number, was discussed by a group of legislators in Beijing on Monday.

Now, China's social insurance funds are managed by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and its branches all over the country.

China had been hit by a series of social insurance fund embezzlement scandals since 1998, with more than 16 billion yuan being misappropriated, said the Chinese Daily.

The new law would ensure better supervision of the funds as it requires them to use the same accounting system, said the newspaper.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, CHINA DAILY/ASIA NEWS NETWORK