The surrender of a major publishing firm (Penguin India) over Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History, in a recent out-of-court settlement that involves the withdrawal of the book and the pulping of its copies, has rightly aroused much disquiet among all circles committed t

The web version of this article corrects a few errors that appeared in the print edition.

A comparison of the consumption expenditure and associated nutritional intake data for 2009-10 with that of 2004-05 shows worsening poverty in terms of the percentage of people unable to reach the minimum required calories energy intake through their monthly spending on all goods and services. This result must be seen in the context of neo-liberal policy, the financial crisis and consequent global recession affecting export production, the rapid rise in food prices, declining employment growth, the drought of 2009-10, and in spite of a positive development like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. It is argued that the decline claimed in the official poverty ratios is spurious.

Continuing the debate on the Deaton and Dreze analysis of food and nutrition in India, it is argued that the latter's analysis is defective because (i) it does not look at direct and indirect cereal consumption when examining the relationship between cereal intake and income, and (ii) it is fallacious to reason that the declining cereal consumption reflects a diversification of diets. It is also pointed out that the Deaton-Dreze critical response to the use of "direct poverty lines" is misplaced.

Urban poverty, when directly measured by counting the persons unable to access the official nutrition norm of 2,100 calories through their total monthly spending on all goods and services, declined between 1983 and 1993-94, but rose substantially between 1993-94 and 2004-05 while poverty depth has increased. This is particularly evident in the states with the conurbations of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata, while states with smaller urban centres have fared better. This paper presents the estimates for urban areas at the all-India level and the individual states. The official method has been underestimating actually existing urban poverty in the same manner that rural poverty has been underestimated. The energy intake accessible at the all-India official urban poverty line has fallen to 1,795, but in many states it is below 1,450 calories at the state-specific official poverty lines. The data also record a small decline in average protein intake and a small rise in fat intake per capita over the same period.

Many economic and social indicators suggest that not only is the level of absolute poverty in India high, there has also been an adverse impact of neoliberal policies on poverty. And yet, the poverty estimates by the Planning Commission and many individual academics, both using a method that renders irrelevant the question of a nutrition norm, show low levels as well as decline in poverty over the 1990s and beyond. This article proves that both comparisons over time of the all-India and state-level estimates of poverty as well as any comparison at a point in time of poverty levels across states, obtained by this method, are invalid. Using a direct poverty estimation route of inspecting and calculating from current National Sample Survey data the percentage of persons not able to satisfy the nutrition norm in calories, the author finds that in 1999-2000 nearly half of the rural population who are actually poor have been excluded from the set of the officially poor. For 2004-05, while the official estimate of rural poverty is 28.3 per cent, the author's direct estimate of persons below the poverty line is 87 per cent. There is clear evidence of a large and growing divergence over time between the author's direct estimates of poverty and the official indirect estimates.