Measuring Poverty

A process for gauging poverty in India covering select dimensions has been institutionalised, but many are critical of this approach

- Amitabh Kundu

ATTEMPTS to operationalise the concept of poverty in Independent India can be traced back to the early sixties when the poverty indices figured in the corridors of decision-making. These, however, were fully or largely anchored on calorie deprivation. Understandably, there was strong criticism for not accounting for essential non-food items like clothing, housing and other assets explicitly in the computation. More importantly, casualness in treating aspects of education, health and other basic amenities like water, sanitation, electricity, etc., came under attack, particularly as there was systematic withdrawal of public agencies in their provisioning. The approach also faced problems due to judgemental factors involved in determining the poverty basket of goods and services for the poor, given the diverse food habits in the country, choosing their appropriate prices, updating the poverty line and the mismatch between consumer expenditure data from NSS and national income accounts. Understandably, there was a chorus from the different branches of social sciences, administrators, and more specifically, the grassroots-level activists, admonishing the experts, largely economists, for not recognising the multi-dimensional aspect of poverty in their methodology.