India’s Official Poverty Lines

Abstract

The concerns of the preceding two chapters are applied to a critical examination, in this chapter, of the procedures by which official poverty lines in India have been determined. It is concluded that these procedures have tended to violate those aspects of logical and normative desirability that should underlie the construction of a reasonable poverty line, as argued in Chaps. 14 and 15. As a consequence, logically unexceptionable variations of the methods adopted in official Indian treatments of the subject could end up displaying declining trends of relatively low levels of poverty or increasing trends of relatively high levels of poverty—without sufficient guidance as to which approach should actually be favoured.