Events

The Centre for Policy Research (CPR) is delighted to invite you to a special talk on:

Measuring Poverty in India

Speakers:

• Dr Roy van der Weide, Senior Economist, World Bank
• Dr Sutirtha Sinha Roy, Economist, World Bank

Discussants:

• Dr Pronab Sen, Country Director, International Growth Centre’s India Programme, and Editor, Indian Journal of National Income & Wealth
• Mahesh Vyas, Managing Director and CEO, Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt Ltd

The event will be held in hybrid mode- at the CPR office (Dharma Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi) and over Zoom. To attend in person, please RSVP to: president.cpr@cprindia.org.

The session will also be live-streamed on the CPR Facebook page.

About the Paper

The last expenditure survey released by India’s National Sample Survey organization dates back to 2011, which is when India last released official estimates of poverty and inequality. This paper by Sutirtha Sinha Roy and Roy Van Der Weide sheds light on how poverty and inequality have evolved since 2011 using a new household panel survey, the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey conducted by a private data company. The results show that: (1) extreme poverty is 12.3 percentage points lower in 2019 than in 2011, with greater poverty reductions in rural areas; (2) urban poverty rose by 2 percentage points in 2016 (coinciding with the demonetization event) and rural poverty reduction stalled by 2019 (coinciding with a slowdown in the economy); (3) poverty is estimated to be considerably higher than earlier projections based on consumption growth observed in national accounts; and (4) consumption inequality in India has moderated since 2011.