-Deccan Herald Dodgy data Surjit Bhalla, India’s Executive Director (IMF), Arvind Virmani, former Chief Economic Advisor under UPA, and K Bhasin, in an IMF Working Paper, state that to estimate poverty, when no survey has been undertaken, is to take the most recent survey (2011-12) data and update individual consumption (or personal) income by the corresponding growth rate observed in the national accounts (NAS). However, there are problems with estimating poverty based on...

-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...

-TheWire.in A recent research paper examining consumption expenditure and landholdings in Uttar Pradesh sheds new light. Mumbai: For years, researchers and academics have studied how wealth and income inequality in India is, more often than not, split along caste lines, with upper castes cornering a larger piece of the pie. However, the measure of their enrichment and the consequent impoverishment and exclusion of Muslim Dalits and Hindu Dalits has received less attention. A...

-Financial Express Dataset and methodological weaknesses cast doubt on recent poverty estimates that claim drastic reduction Bhalla, Bhasin and Virmani in a working paper (IMF), claimed India’s poverty, per a $1.9 per person per day poverty line (at PPP), was 0.9% of the population in 2020. Thanks to government transfer of free rations of 5 kg per person month, it fell to 0.8% (from 0.9% in 2019). Roy and de Velt, for...

-Hindustan Times Almost two and a half years after the 2017-18 Consumption Expenditure Survey (CES) was scrapped, the ‘great Indian poverty debate’ seems to have resurrected itself. The second season of this debate, interestingly, has started from Washington DC, not India. Poverty statistics in India have always been the subject of controversy. The country saw a big debate on the trend in poverty and the veracity of poverty estimates in the 2000s....