Comparing surveys on Indian poverty

• A study by Himanshu et al. estimates that poverty reduction in India slowed significantly after 2011-12, with poverty levels falling from 37% in 2004-05 to 22% by 2011-12.

• The study cites three methodologies: alternative socio-economic surveys of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), Private Final Consumption Expenditure (PFCE) estimates from the government’s National Accounts Statistics (NAS), and survey-to-survey imputation methods.

• The authors note that these methods are prone to somewhat divergent results, but are useful in revealing trends in data.

• The authors also note that their strategy differs from previous attempts in three aspects: using the Tendulkar Committee’s poverty lines, using the employment surveys of the NSSO for imputation, and their own imputation models are estimated at the State level or include State-fixed effects when estimated at the sector level.

• The authors note that while poverty based on the Tendulkar Committee poverty lines fell sharply between 2004-05 and 2011-12 — from 37% to 22% — it subsequently has fallen only to around 18% by 2022.

• The number of poor persons in India fell only slightly since 2011-12, from 250 million persons to about 225 million in 2022–23.

• The authors acknowledge that a full resolution of the present debate on poverty is unlikely to be forthcoming without new government data that can be compared with previous years’ data.

• They also back up their findings using other data sources that point to the same conclusions.