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Extent of Poverty in India
The poverty line in India is usually associated with a calorie threshold. This calorie threshold approach suffers from many problems. An alternative revealed preference-based approach has been provided by Jensen and Miller. In the JM approach, the staple calorie share reveals whether a household is calorie deprived. We use this approach to estimate the extent of poverty in India. Though our poverty estimates are very close to the Tendulkar Committee estimates for the urban sector, for the rural sector our estimates are considerably lower. We also fi nd by our method a remarkable rise in urban poverty between 2004-05 and 2007-08.
The authors thank Debasis Mondal for discussions on this study. We have also benefi ted from the comments of seminar participants at the Indian Statistical Institute (Kolkata) and an anonymous reviewer. We thank the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode for providing us fi nancial assistance (Small Grant Research Project) to undertake this study. The usual disclaimers apply.
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