India's poverty count

OME FEBRUARY, India will roll out its first National Household Income Sample Survey. The exercise will measure household incomes and, in doing so, estimate levels of poverty, or prosperity, across the country. In effect, the survey will prepare a balance sheet for Indian households. It will seek extensive information on incomes and expenditures of a household—from input and output costs of a farmer to a taxpayer’s payout-to-loan burdens, an informal worker’s days of work and income, and a hotel employee's earnings from tips. Spanning community groups, the survey will calculate household “profits” and assess the value of assets like land and farms. It will also assign monetary value to welfare benefits received, arriving at a final estimate of household income. Such income surveys, though being adopted in India for the first time, are in use in countries across the world, like the US, China and Bangladesh.

- RICHARD MAHAPATRA

This is an important development as India suffers from lack of poverty data. Traditionally, poverty has been estimated using household expenditure surveys conducted by the National Statistics Office (NSO), with expenditure used as a proxy to gauge income. The last official poverty estimate dates to 2012, and the national poverty line was last updated in 2014. Though two household expenditure surveys were conducted thereafter, the government did not use the findings to revise poverty estimates. So, India today does not have an official estimate of poverty, even though it implements vast targeted poverty eradication programmes.