The concept of poverty no doubt relates to those who are gradually losing, or have lost, the means of subsistence and have nothing to sell but their labour in the market, which does not work perfectly for them. This is a minimal hypothesis within the givens of the principle of modern economy. The first premise with which this paper starts off is that the essence of poverty of the poor lies not in statistics ( for example, income poverty as measured by headcount ratio) excepting the fact that it holds the image of poverty in terms of mediated numbers. The site of the poor, if represented in abstract numbers, is always lost sight of. Asa preliminary methodological approach, an attempt is made to put different but related sets of data that have something to do with the poverty to see that how they reflect upon each other in so far as one set of numbers associated with one characteristic of the people in distress is not sufficient unto itself. Contrary to what is expected in the habitual mode of thought, the sets of data related to employment, unemployment, the incidence of debt, cost of living indices, food grains production, its per capita viability reveal a somewhat different story from that of the headcount ratio as arrived at, as concerns the 55th round of NSS results for household consumption expenditure. This paper has not drawn any settled conclusions, but has modestly striven to problematize the issue of poverty hurled into the fiery debate around the question of whether it has increased or declined since 90’s