Title: Changing poverty line - inclusion and exclusion of poor in Indian states

Authors: Balaji Murugesan

Addresses: Humanities and Social Sciences Department, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Chennai, 600036, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract: The Tendulkar committee and the Rangarajan committee had provided different poverty estimates for India in the past. It is necessary to appreciate the consequences of changing poverty estimates in identification of poor and non-poor households. This paper seeks to examine the sensitivity of the distributional profile in eight developed and under developed Indian states to a unit change in Tendulkar poverty line by applying kernel density function for the consumer expenditure distribution from the National Sample Survey Organization's 55th, 61st, 66th and 68th quinquennial rounds. The developed states have exhibited higher sensitivity compared to neo-patrimonial states to a unit change in poverty line. It is ascertained that the inclusion error will decline and exclusion error will increase if we move down the poverty line over a period of time as the poor people in the poverty zone are escaping at varied rates across space and time.

Keywords: poverty; poor; poverty line; poverty measurement.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBEX.2020.111487

International Journal of Business Excellence, 2020 Vol.22 No.4, pp.492 - 515

Received: 20 Oct 2018
Accepted: 02 May 2019
Published online: 30 Nov 2020 *

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