What matters is not the number, but the safety net
- Sonalde Desai
- Updated: Jul 2, 2024, 21:22 IST IST
India’s growing economy is lifting families out of poverty but often onto a precarious perch. A single disaster can push them right back. Policy, obsessed with counting the poor, ignores the question of helping ‘newly poor’
Two decades ago, controversies around the measurement of poverty in National Sample Surveys set off what became known as the Great Indian Poverty Debate. We seem to have come full circle with new controversies about poverty measurement, leading to the Great Indian Poverty Debate 2. But is counting the exact number of individuals whose incomes fall below the poverty line, located around ₹1,900, as important as understanding the nature of poverty decline and its implications for social policy?
Some estimates based on Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) place poverty under 5%. Newly collected Wave 3 of India Human Development Survey (IHDS) places it at about 8.5%. HCES probably underestimates poverty due to a change in methodology, while IHDS probably overestimates poverty due to its reliance on an older sampling frame that omits newly growing peri-urban areas. However, both suggest that poverty is declining. The multidimensional poverty index released by Niti Aayog also documents improvements in the conditions under which households live.
Some estimates based on Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) place poverty under 5%. Newly collected Wave 3 of India Human Development Survey (IHDS) places it at about 8.5%. HCES probably underestimates poverty due to a change in methodology, while IHDS probably overestimates poverty due to its reliance on an older sampling frame that omits newly growing peri-urban areas. However, both suggest that poverty is declining. The multidimensional poverty index released by Niti Aayog also documents improvements in the conditions under which households live.
