Reassessing India’s Poverty Decline over the Missing Decade: 2011-12 to 2022-23

Maitreesh Ghatak and Rishabh Kumar

No 19909, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: This paper addresses the lack of official data on Indian poverty between 2011-12 and 2022-23, a period known as the "missing decade". It critiques two major attempts to estimate poverty during this time: one using national account growth rates and the other using a private survey. These methods are criticised for their assumptions and data limitations. The paper proposes a new method, imputing consumption from official labour force surveys using a wage-based model. The authors find that poverty reduction was not as dramatic as previously suggested, with about 20% of Indians living in poverty on the eve of the pandemic. The paper's analysis aligns with the fact that India's structural economic transformation was limited, with agriculture output stagnant and regional convergence lacking. The paper concludes that while poverty may have gone down, but its rate of decline has been slow in the decade after 2011-12.

JEL-codes: C81 I32 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-02
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