Rural Poverty and Its Alleviation in India N Kakwani K Subbarao WE wish to respond to recent comments made by Ranade [1991] oh our paper 'Rural Poverty and Its Alleviation in India' [1990, 1991,1992]. His comments are mainly focused on the decomposition methodology used by us. This methodology enables one to separate the impact on poverty of changes in mean consumption and in its inequality. The methodology has also attracted attention from writers such as Datt and Ravallion [1991] and Jain and Tendulkar [1990]. From these writings it appears that there exists a lot of misunderstanding about the decomposition. The recent comment by Ranade [1991] has made further contribution to this misunderstanding.
