The Iniquity of Money-Metric Poverty in India

Jayaraj D () and Subramanian S ()
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Jayaraj D: Madras Institute of Development Studies, 79 II Main Road, Gandhinagar AdyarChennai- 600 020, India
Subramanian S: Independent ResearcherChennaiIndia

Basic Income Studies, 2017, vol. 12, issue 1, 26

Abstract: This paper is concerned to make three points about money-metric poverty in India: first, that the standard poverty-line approach to measuring poverty considerably underestimates poverty, and that the particular protocols by which India’s official poverty lines are determined are arbitrary and misleading; second, that a view of poverty in which the achievement of a satisfactory level of income is seen as a valuable end in itself, and which is captured in something like Kaushik Basu’s ‘quintile income statistic’, suggests a high order of income-poverty in the country which belies the relatively encouraging trends exhibited by headcount ratios based on official poverty lines; and third, that the continued co-existence of large amounts of poverty with large amounts of inequality needs to be redeemed by some deliberate redistributive strategy aimed at providing something like a guaranteed basic minimum income to every citizen of the country—for reasons, at least, of self-interest, if not justice.

Keywords: poverty line; quintile income statistic; unaccounted income; guaranteed basic income (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B40 D30 D31 D63 I32 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1515/bis-2016-0005

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