Poverty in India and it's Decompositions: A Critical Appraisal of the New Method

This work was motivates by the report on new poverty lines submitted by the Tendulkar committee.
The Planning Commission recently released poverty estimates across states for rural and urban areas of India for 2009–10 (GoI 2012). A matter of concern raised in the media is low poverty lines leading to a social experiment of living by spending 32 rupees only per day by young persons. There have been discussions in the academia also. This has revived the need to critically evaluate the Report of the Expert Group to Review the Methodology for Estimation of Poverty (GoI 2009). The purpose of this chapter is two-fold. First, we raise some issues with regard to the new method, which also borrows from existing literature, including some earlier work of ours (Pathak and Mishra 2011; also see Mishra 2012).
Second, we use the poverty lines provided by the Planning Commission for rural and urban areas separately to compute the incidence, depth, and severity of poverty and inequality
at the aggregate all-India level as also across states, social groups, religious groups, occupational groups, educationwise, and gender-wise. We also analyse poverty reduction
between 2004–5 and 2009–10 at the aggregate all-India level as also for some sub-groups of the population by looking into sectoral and growth-inequality decompositions. The
differential impact of the growth process between these two time points on poorer and richer sections of society is also visualized through growth incidence curves for rural
and urban India.
The complete paper can be accessed in the Human Development Report, 2012-13, published by the Oxford University Press, India.
Find it here: Poverty in India and Its Decompositions: A Critical Appraisal of the New Method