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In 2011 the question of how poverty is defined and measured became the subject of intense political debate in India, following the submission of an affidavit from the Planning Commission to the Supreme Court, setting out the official poverty lines of Rs 26 per person per day in rural India, and Rs 32 in urban centres. In one intervention in the debate, the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission was challenged to live in Delhi on Rs 32 per day. These measures of poverty were derived from work done originally in the early 1970s, in which the poverty line was set at the average monthly consumption expenditure of households whose members were able to consume 2,400 calories per person per day in rural India, or 2,100 in urban India (these intakes of dietary energy being reckoned to be what was required in India for sustaining life and necessary activity). Consumption expenditure data comes from regular sample surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO); and the poverty line has been regularly updated, using consumer price indices – though the numbers, increasingly, have had little to do with actual calorie consumption. An economist who has devoted his professional work to poverty measurement, S. Subramanian, comments that ‘officially “price corrected” poverty lines progressively fall short of calorific norms on the basis of which they were initially rationalised’ (2016). Still, the methodology, and the measures, are roughly equivalent to the World Bank’s procedures, which established the well-known poverty line of $1 per person per day (later $1.25 per day and since October 2015, $1.90 per day) at purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates, that has been widely referred to in assessments of the extent of poverty across the world (critiqued by Reddy and Pogge 2009). The measures, both of the World Bank and of the Government of India, are distinctly niggardly, allowing for not much more than the maintenance of life. Vijay Joshi suggests that they can be described as reflecting ‘extreme poverty’ (2017: 29).

In India the basic methodology has been revisited and rejigged on a number of occasions, by expert groups of economists, most recently by a committee chaired by Suresh Tendulkar, which reported in 2009 – and whose estimates became the stuff of controversy in 2011, so leading to the constitution of an another expert group, in 2012, chaired by C. Rangararan, which reported in 2014 (and raised the poverty line, so that by 2011–12, according to this committee’s methodology, there were 96 million more poor people in India than according to the Tendulkar-based count: see Joshi 2017, table 2.4). Subsequently, following the replacement by the BJP government in 2015 of the Planning Commission with the NITI Aayog (‘National Institution for Transforming India’), yet another committee has in turn reviewed the recommendations of these expert groups – with what outcome is unknown at the time of writing (in March 2019, by which time no official estimates of poverty levels had been published since 2011–12). The upshot has been the proliferation of quite wildly divergent estimates of the extent of poverty in India, produced by different official bodies. The Tendulkar Committee produced an estimate of 37.2 per cent of the population in 2004–05 (407 million people), when the (old) official estimate for that year stood at 27.5 per cent (302 million people). These are ‘headcount poverty ratios’ – referring to the proportion of the population unable to meet the minimum consumption requirements set out in the methodology described earlier. At about the same time, and with reference to the same date, another committee, chaired by N. C. Saxena, argued that for practical purposes – of providing for the welfare of the people – the estimate of the incidence of poverty should be increased to 50 per cent; while the National Commission on Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, chaired by Arjun Sengupta, estimated that 77 per cent should be considered poor. The World Bank estimate of the incidence of poverty in India in 2005 was 40 per cent; that of the Asian Development Bank, about 50 per cent. S. Subramanian has commented that ‘the official methodology has thrown the door open to complete anarchy’ (2016). And this remark is with reference to the preferred conventional procedures for measuring poverty levels, based on NSSO data on household consumption expenditure. Another whole dimension of debate arises from the fact that observations of mean consumption reported in India’s National Accounts are significantly (and increasingly) above those provided by the survey data – though the survey data are generally preferred, because they measure living standards directly.

That there should be so many different estimates points to the considerable technical difficulties associated with defining and measuring poverty – which involves a whole series of judgement calls. A respected Indian economist, A. Vaidyanathan, who has devoted much of his long professional life to these matters, has written that ‘it is not possible to arrive at a definitive estimate of poverty incidence that can be used as a reasonably robust benchmark’ (Vaidyanathan 2013: 41. See also Krishnaji 2012 for a similar argument by another senior economist). He was referring here especially to the problem of identifying ‘the poor’ for the purpose of allocating welfare benefits supplied by government. An important instance of this is that of access to foodgrains and other basic consumer goods at controlled, low prices, through India’s Public Distribution System (PDS). This has been targeted, in principle, since 1997, to those defined as being ‘Below the Poverty Line’ (BPL). But how are the ‘BPL’ to be identified? The main reason why the poverty line calculations offered by the Planning Commission in 2011 became the subject of so much controversy was that it was suggested that the poverty estimates to which they gave rise would be used for targeting purposes – though the Tendulkar Committee had expressly advised against this. The absurdity of the procedure was pointed up in a cartoon in the English language newspaper The Hindu (22 September 2011), which showed an obviously poor man crossing the road to join his family, living on the pavement, and saying to a passing motorist who was offering him some coins, ‘No thanks. I’ve earned Rs. 25 today. I don’t want to lose my BPL status’.

This is not to say that the attempt to measure the incidence of poverty in a country, to track trends over time, and to make comparisons across regions, is worthless. These certainly are important data for any responsible government, and in a democracy should be expected to play a part in its evaluation by the electorate (so governments have an incentive to set the poverty line low, in order to enhance the chances of producing a favourable impression). It is for this reason that we go on to review evidence on poverty trends in India, and on the extent of poverty among different social groups, as these are given by the conventional monetary measures. But we should remind ourselves that the poverty line is a construction, not a truth (and, in India, a construction that might be significantly improved – see Subramanian 2014). An aggregated measure does not, of course, take account of differences between individuals, between, for instance, those who are disabled in some way and others, or between people living in different localities with very different needs in terms of clothing and shelter. And the monetary measure of poverty may not take account of important differences that have to do with public services, such as the availability or not of clean water, which exercises such an important influence on nutrition and health. So, as Vaidyanathan has also argued

Strategies to address the myriad and varied disabilities of the poor cannot be decided on the basis of the overall incidence of income poverty. They need to be based on assessments of the deficiencies of access and realization relative to accepted minimum desirable levels of specific components of living standards such as food intake, unemployment and underemployment, housing, connectivity and indicators of health and education status’ (Vaidyanathan 2013: 41).

Latterly, several different attempts have been made to come up with multidimensional assessments of the incidence of poverty, taking account of direct measures of nutrition and health, and of other indicators of living standards, of which the best known is that of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (www.ophi.org.uk). The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), published since 2010 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), is based on the work of the Oxford Group. We consider this, too, in what follows, where we discuss the findings of the mainstream of poverty research relating to India.