India’s consumption survey: A significant shift amid modest gains

livemint.com:

₹1,430 back then to ₹2,008 now at 2011-12 prices (adjusted, i.e., for inflation), and in urban India, it went up from ₹2,630 to ₹3,510. At current prices, our rural MPCE was ₹3,773, and urban, ₹6,459 in 2022-23. Given the span of a decade-plus, the gains made have been slow, but there is no evidence of the stagnancy that some critics feared.

A general improvement in people’s diets is also discernible. Although the MPCE share spent on cereals fell to 4.9% in 2022-23 from 10.7% in 2011-12, this sharp drop can be explained by the government’s free food handouts, which aim at food security and enable the needy to spend on other stuff. Increased spending on protein-rich dairy products, eggs, fish and meat, apart from fresh fruits, beverages and processed food, suggests a better-fed country on the whole.

With foodgrain staples assured for another five years, have-nots can count on using their money for various other purchases as we go along. Hopefully, this will lead to better nutrition among our multitudes. While an absolute poverty ratio can be derived from the latest HCES data, the expense patterns in the Fact Sheet seem to back the Centre’s claim of 250 million people having been lifted out of multidimensional poverty in the nine years from 2013-14 to 2022-23.

After the HCES of 2017-18 was scrapped, however, suspicions arose of political optics getting the better of data reliability. The survey, after all, had long served as a tool for poverty estimation and an input for other statistical measures used by economic policymakers. Revisions in the basket of items that make up India’s retail price index, for example, are usually based on this survey.