iii. How has poverty estimation evolved in India?
Poverty estimation in India has evolved in the following ways:
- In the pre-independent era, Dadabhai Naoroji, in his “Poverty and the Un-British Rule in India” was among the first to estimate poverty in India linked to British rule.
- Later, the National Planning Committee(1938) and the Bombay Plan(1944) formulated their respective poverty lines.
- The Alagh Committee (1979) developed a poverty line for rural and urban areas based on nutritional requirements. Also, DT Lakdawala (1993) suggested calculating consumption expenditure based on calorie consumption and constructing state-specific poverty lines that could be regularly updated.
- Tendulkar Committee (2009): The Tendulkar Committee recommended changing monthly household consumption into consumption expenditure per person per day.
- The national poverty line for 2011-12 was estimated at Rs. 816 per capita per month for rural areas and Rs. 1,000 per capita per month for urban areas
- Rangarajan Committee (2014): It recommended separate consumption baskets for rural and urban areas which include food items that ensure recommended calorie, protein & fat intake and non-food items like clothing, education, health, housing and transport.
- It recommended monthly per capita consumption expenditure of Rs. 972 in rural areas and Rs. 1407 in urban areas as the poverty line
- Socio-Economic Caste Survey (SECC), 2011: It was based on the committee chaired by Dr. N. C. Saxena to propose a new methodology for identifying below poverty line households. The committee recommended a three-fold classification of households: Automatically excluded, Automatically included and Others
- Government has also being using SECC data for identification of beneficiary households while implementing its social welfare programmes
Currently, poverty estimation in India is carried out by NITI Aayog Task force. It uses data collected by the National Sample Survey Office (Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI)) to calculate the poverty line.