Context: Thali Index shows real hunger, urging a shift from calorie-based to practical, food-based poverty measures in India.
Relevance of the Topic: Prelims: Poverty estimates in India. Mains: Issues with current poverty estimates.
Poverty Estimates in India
- Officially approved poverty measurement in India has involved estimating the level of consumption expenditure sufficient to enable the minimum calorie intake necessary for living and working. If a person could afford food that gave them a certain number of calories (2400 cal in rural areas, 2100 cal in urban areas), they are not considered poor.
- Committees like Tendulkar and Rangarajan suggested updates, but India has not revised its official poverty line since 2011-12.
- This calorie-focused approach does not match how people actually live today. It ignores how expensive health, transport, and education have become.
Thali Index - A new approach:
- A “thali” is a traditional Indian meal with rice or roti, dal, and vegetables. Indians recognise the thali as a fairly complete and nutritionally balanced unit of food consumption.
- CRISIL estimated that in 2023-24, the cost of one such home-cooked thali was around ₹30. The researchers found that: 40% of rural Indians and 10% of urban Indians could not afford two thalis a day.
- This paints a very different picture than the reports from SBI or the World Bank.
- SBI reported a remarkable decline in rural poverty, estimated at 4.86% in FY24 and urban poverty estimated at 4.09%.
- The World Bank’s report pegged “extreme poverty” at 2.8% for rural India and 1.1% for urban India in 2022-23.
Why does this gap exist?
- Most poverty estimates look at total consumption spending. But in real life, people must first pay for essential expenditures like housing, transport, health, education, etc. Expenditure on food ends up as the residual expenditure.
- That is why measuring actual food spending, like how many thalis one can buy, gives a clearer picture of people’s living conditions.
Benefits of Thali Index:
- Thali Index can help make welfare schemes like PDS or food subsidies more targeted.
- It pushes policymakers to consider real-life costs people face, not just abstract numbers.
- It throws light on hidden hunger and malnutrition.
Limitations of Thali index:
- Thali prices vary between cities and villages, and across seasons.
- The Index focuses on food and may miss out on other aspects like schooling, sanitation, or shelter.
What can be done?
- Use the Thali Index along with other tools like the Multidimensional Poverty Index.
- Regularly update poverty measures to reflect current spending habits.
- Eliminating the food subsidy at the upper reaches of the distribution while enhancing it at the lower levels.
India has made significant gains in income-based poverty reduction, but food deprivation persists at large. It is time to move beyond calorie counts to more practical indicators like the Thali Index, which focuses on real hunger and basic human needs.