How India counts poverty

Poverty is not a physical fact like height; it is measured against a line, and where the line is drawn changes who counts as poor. India has traditionally measured poverty by consumption expenditure: households are surveyed on what they spend, and those spending below a threshold are counted as poor. The threshold is the poverty line, and the share of people below it is the poverty ratio. Because the line is a judgement — what basket of goods is the minimum for a dignified life? — rival committees have produced different numbers from the same surveys.

The Tendulkar Committee, which reported in 2009, moved the line from a calorie-only basket to one covering food, education and health, and set monthly per capita lines of Rs 816 for rural areas and Rs 1,000 for urban areas at 2011-12 prices. On that basis the Planning Commission estimated poverty at 21.9 per cent in 2011-12, down from 37.2 per cent in 2004-05. The Rangarajan Committee, which reported in 2014, used a wider basket and higher lines — Rs 972 rural and Rs 1,407 urban — and estimated poverty at 29.5 per cent for the same year. The two figures describe the same country in the same year: the gap is entirely about method.

A second approach counts deprivations directly. The National Multidimensional Poverty Index, published by NITI Aayog, uses 12 indicators across health, education and living standards, and counts a household as poor if it is deprived in a weighted combination of them. Its discussion paper reported multidimensional poverty falling from 29.17 per cent in 2013-14 to 11.28 per cent in 2022-23, with about 24.82 crore people moving out of multidimensional poverty in that period. Critics note that the 2013-14 figure is an estimate built from earlier survey data and the 2022-23 figure a projection from the 2019-21 survey, so the numbers should be read as indicative, not as precise annual counts.

International comparisons add a third lens. The World Bank, using its extreme poverty line, estimated India's extreme poverty rate at 2.3 per cent in 2022-23, down from 16.2 per cent in 2011-12. No single measure settles the question of how many Indians are poor. Consumption lines miss deprivations in health and schooling; multidimensional indices involve judgement in weighting; and all measures depend on surveys that are infrequent and contested. The honest answer in civil studies is to state the measure, the year and the source — and to note that poverty has fallen on most measures, while remaining a mass phenomenon.