NEW DELHI, September 8, 2008 (AFP) - Housewife Gangotri's family earns less than 100 dollars a month, but officials have told her she no longer counts among India's poor, and will not be eligible for subsidised food.

Her mason husband earns about 45 dollars a month, but the household income went up after her son started earning as well -- thus denying them access to state benefits.

'This income is not enough for the six of us if we buy food at market rates,' she said.

People such as Gangotri are now being targeted for a host of existing state benefits -- which are lost in red tape -- under an ambitious plan by the Delhi government to 'redefine' the poorest and most vulnerable of urban people.

Under current rules, Delhi residents qualify as being 'below poverty line' if the household income is less than fifty dollars a month.

'This figure is appallingly low. This is not poverty line, but starvation line,' said Biraj Patnaik, a commissioner appointed by India's Supreme Court to monitor the new programme.

Officially, only about 400,000 of Delhi's 16 million population count as poor, but Patnaik says this number should be about 960,000 people under a more realistic definition of poverty.

The World Bank has also recently revised its one-dollar-a-day yardstick for poverty to include those living on less than 1.25 dollars a day -- which means that 456 million Indians are poor.

But even the officially poor find it extremely tough to cut through bureaucratic red tape to avail themselves of a rash of cash schemes for widows, pensioners, tuberculosis patients and other needy people.

The Delhi government spends around seven billion rupees (150 million dollars) annually on welfare funds under some 45 such programmes, but corruption is so rampant that most of these funds never reach the poor, officials admit.

'When you ask for a ration card to be made, they ask for voter ID card. When you ask for a voter ID card, they want a ration card as proof of residence,' said Girija Sahu, a project officer supervising the survey.

A ration card enables poor people to get rice, wheat and kerosene oil for cooking at a fraction of the market rates, but getting one is not always easy.

In the past three months, the government has cancelled 200,000 ration cards, after finding they were being misused to sell subsidised food in the market.

'One household was found to have 900 ration cards,' said court commissioner Patnaik.

Under the new 'Mission convergence' plan, not only will more people be identified for these programmes, a new computerised system will also cut paper work and corruption.

Hundreds of activists have fanned out in Delhi's vast slums to conduct a fresh survey of the poor, who can then be given a 'smart card' -- which will be their window to a slice of welfare funds.

'This card will make it simpler to access welfare programmes run by nine different departments,' the programme's director Rashmi Singh told AFP.

Around 600,000 households, accounting for three million people, will be surveyed in the next three months and new cards be given next year.

'It may not eliminate corruption completely, but corruption will be curtailed to a large extent,' said Patnaik, adding he would push the courts to implement the programme nationwide.