National Sample Survey Data Revealed Diverse Countryside Domestic Consumption Expenses across fifteen States in India

Recent debate in development literature pertains to identifying the focus of development, whether it should be growth, poverty, or inequality. The reemergence of the age old issue of growth inequality has brought the debate on poverty to the center stage with large political and emotional undertone. This has been also been facilitated by the quality and the type of data (panel data on household consumption expenditure) which was not the case earlier. “Report of the Expert Group to Review the Methodology for Estimation of Poverty”, Planning Commission, GOI (2009) observed that “While acknowledging the multidimensional nature of poverty, the estimates of poverty will continue to be based on private household consumer expenditure of Indian households as collected by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO)”. The largest numbers of poor, primarily landless workers, are in rural areas and the majority of them still rely on farm work for their livelihood. It will be of relevance to have a comparative analysis of Rural Household Consumption Expenditure over different time periods and across difference states in India. This paper is an attempt towards analyzing trends in rural household consumption expenditure over last two decades using NSS data.