Do We Know What has Happened to Poverty since 2011-12? -Himanshu

-The India Forum

The government's lack of respect for national surveys on consumption has meant that the door has been opened to preparation of unofficial estimates on poverty made on questionable assumptions. Two such recent estimates highlight the need to resume collection of data to get a true picture of poverty

The government of India does not seem to be interested in knowing how many poor there are in the country.

The missing poverty estimates

Until a few years ago, estimation of poverty in the country was always accorded a high priority, which has changed since 2014 when one official report on the measurement of poverty was ignored and then in 2019 when data collected by an autonomous government agency in 2017-18 was junked.

The absence of official data means that questions about who gains from economic growth and how the poor survive during times of slowdown and pandemic are now left to private researchers to answer. Two new sets of estimates on poverty and the trend since 2011-12 prepared by individual researchers have renewed focus on the absence of official data, as also on the quality of these two particular estimates.

The official estimates of poverty have hitherto been based on the consumption expenditure surveys (CES) of the National Statistical Office (NSO). The CES, part of the National Sample Surveys (NSS), are conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation; the NSSO has now been made part of the NSO. The CES have been available since the 1950s and are very highly regarded for the quality of the survey as well as the independence of the survey agency.

The last such exercise was carried out in 2017-18 but the results of that CES survey were withheld by the government for reasons that are not entirely clear. While the official press release by the government mentioned problems with the quality of data collected, no details were provided about the nature of the problems. No study reports or any exercise that may have examined these problems have been made public.. This is against the standard practice of the NSO that used to release unit level data even for surveys that used experimental surveys and generated academic debate.

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