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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Statistics of poverty suffer from the country’s poverty of statistics -Himanshu

Statistics of poverty suffer from the country’s poverty of statistics -Himanshu

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published Published on May 6, 2022   modified Modified on May 10, 2022

-Livemint.com

India’s lack of official data for estimates could impair policy formulation and thus hurt the economy

Two different sets of poverty estimates for India were released recently. One of the papers was authored by Surjit Bhalla, Karan Bhasin, and Arvind Virmani and the second by Sutirtha Roy and Roy Weide, both affiliated to the World Bank. Both presented estimates for roughly the same period, after 2011-12, but ended up at starkly different estimates of poverty and the magnitude of its decline. This is in contrast with two earlier estimates, both of which showed an increase in poverty after 2011-12 using data on consumption expenditure from the National Statistical Office (NSO), although from different surveys. S. Subramanian presented his estimates in 2019 using leaked data of consumption expenditure from the 2017-18 survey which was junked by the government. On the other hand, Santosh Mehrotra and Jajati Parida used consumption aggregates from the NSO’s employment surveys to arrive at broadly similar estimates as Subramanian of a rise in poverty after 2011-12.

Putting it all together, one gets estimates of poverty ranging from 2.9% by Bhalla, Bhasin and Virmani to 13.6% by Roy and Weide, 25.9% by Mehrotra and Parida and 35.1% by Subramanian. Except for Mehrotra and Parida’s, whose estimates are for 2019-20, the rest are for 2017-18. Clearly, the variation is too vast. The reality doesn’t change irrespective of the way poverty is measured, but that variation is an indicator of the state of affairs in poverty measurement. The differences in poverty estimates are due to the measure of income/consumption used as much as their choice of poverty lines. While Subramanian used leaked NSO data on consumption, Mehrotra and Parida used a short consumption question in NSO’s job surveys. Roy and Weide used the Consumer Pyramid Household Survey of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, with some adjustment. Bhalla, Bhasin and Virmani have used the private final consumption expenditure (PFCE) estimate of National Accounts to create a series. The only one that’s different here is the estimate by Bhalla, Bhasin and Virmani which does not use a household survey; this is the old method that Bhalla has been advocating without success, given the non-comparability of National Accounts data with survey data. Differences also arise from the poverty line: Like Roy and Weide, Bhalla, Bhasin and Virmani used the $1.9 and $3.2 poverty line of the World Bank, while Subramanian and Mehrotra and Parida used the official poverty lines by the Rangarajan and Tendulkar committees, respectively.

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Livemint.com, 6 May, 2022, https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/statistics-of-poverty-suffer-from-the-country-s-poverty-of-statistics-11651776978366.html


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