-The Indian Express Agricultural GDP is underestimated due to inaccurate non-cereal data. It started with a mundane question: what is the chicken population in India? There are glaring inconsistencies in the available data. The National Sample Survey Organisation's (NSSO's) surveys show a 20 per cent annual growth of chicken consumption between 2005 and 2010. But according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the production of chicken meat only rose 10 per...

-The Hindu We rarely ask the poor what poverty means to them and what changes in lifestyle would make them poverty-free The idea that poverty is determined, defined and measured by a group of people mostly unaffected by it is an intriguing one. Numerous definitions and studies globally tell us what poverty is, how it is measured - extreme and the moderate (there are categories!). Though surprisingly, none of these definitions has...

-Down to Earth   This defies logic. Despite rapid economic growth, India has often been placed below sub-Saharan African countries that have very high number of malnourished children. But the government has no data to clarify its position. In the first week of September, Parliament’s Committee on Estimates criticised the government, saying: “The committee is surprised to note that in the modern era of Information and Technology, there is no recent official...

-Frontline Once more, without feeling: the government's latest poverty estimates. YET again the Central government has mired itself in controversy by releasing its latest poverty estimates based on the consumption expenditure survey of the NSSO (National Sample Survey Office) Survey of 2011-12. The Planning Commission's poverty line, using methodology suggested by the Tendulkar Committee in 2010, is now apparently defined as the spending of Rs. 27.20 per capita per day in rural...

-The Indian Express What caused the steep fall in poverty reported by the Planning Commission? The evidence is mixed Earlier this week, the Planning Commission released estimates of the incidence of poverty in 2011-12. As in virtually the entire literature on the measurement of poverty in India, these estimates are based on data on per capita consumption expenditure collected by the National Sample Survey Organisation. The estimates show that there has been...