Poverty Measurement – India

Posted on December 11, 2009 by townsend

• India set to measure poverty beyond food, By S.P.S. Pannu, December 11, 2009, India Today: “India is likely to switch to a new method of estimating poverty, which includes total expenditure required by families on clothes, housing, health, education and conveyance apart from adequate food, which was until now the sole criterion for determining poverty. Planning Commission member Abhjit Sen said this gives a more realistic picture of the poverty level as the earlier estimates were based only on the food calorie intake of a person. Sen said the new method uses the lifestyle of the urban households as a benchmark for the rural families as well since they also need to spend on health, education, clothes, transport and housing. Estimates, for the year 2003- 04, using the new method show that a whopping 41.8 per cent of the country’s rural population live below the poverty line based on the wider criteria…”
• 37.2% of India is in poverty by criterion of consumption, By P. Vaidyanathan Iyer and Priyadarshi Siddhanta, December 9, 2009, Express India: “The poverty ratio or the number of poor as a percentage of total population in India for 2004-05 is estimated at 37.2 per cent, according to a new report submitted on Tuesday by the Suresh Tendulkar committee to Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia. The committee, headed by Tendulkar, former chairman of the PM’s Economic Advisory Council, was asked to review the methodology to measure poverty. The committee has defined the poor based on a normative living standard – it has moved away from calorie intake as the criterion and considered per capita consumption expenditure on commodities and services. The number of poor in India in 2004-05 based on an estimate by the Planning Commission released in March 2007 is 30.17 crore or 27.5 per cent of the population. It will, however, be wrong to compare the Tendulkar committee’s estimate with the Plan panel’s 2007 numbers since the criteria for defining the poverty line itself have changed…”