Poverty in India: Tracking it mustn’t become a casualty of politics

livemint.com:

Elections in India seem to be incomplete these days without the background noise of a statistical controversy. Ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the suppression of an unflattering employment report had ignited a controversy. At that time, two members of the National Statistical Commission (NSC), India’s apex statistical regulator, had resigned in protest.

They were vindicated when the ministry of statistics and programme implementation (Mospi) released the report just after that year’s elections were concluded. This time, the partial release of a rather flattering consumption expenditure survey has stirred a controversy. Niti Aayog’s chief executive was quick to claim that the survey shows an unprecedented decline in poverty over the past decade.

Some economists lent support to the establishment view. Others have challenged such claims, since the new consumption survey of 2022-23 has been conducted using a different method, which makes its results incomparable with the past. To make sense of the latest controversy, it is useful to understand the backstory first.

The idea of a poverty line is as old as economics itself. Classical economists (such as David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus) held that workers were paid “subsistence wages"—just enough to buy the minimum quantity of food and clothing needed to survive. The first poverty line for British India, developed by nationalist thinker Dadabhai Naoroji, was also based on a similar idea.

Across ages and continents, most economists have held that a person must count as poor if she doesn’t have enough to eat. Most modern economists also agree that it is not enough just to eat adequate food; people also need access to basic services (education, health, shelter, etc). As long