Former Deputy Director General, NSSO, Government of India.
The views expressed are personal and not of the organization to which the author belonged
Official estimates of poverty line, poverty prevalence rates and aggregate number of poor persons in the rural and urban sectors at the state and all India level for the year 2011–2012 has been recently released by Planning Commission, Government of India (2013). The head count ratio (HCR) has been obtained using rural and urban poverty lines which are applied on the observed size distribution of consumption expenditure in the rural and urban sectors of different states based on mixed reference period (MRP) for collection of data on different items of consumption. As poverty prevalence rates (HCR) merely determines the size of the poor population and incapable of measuring shortfall in income/expenditure among the poor, we have obtained other distributive sensitive measures of poverty belonging to Foster, Greer and Thorbeck (1988) Pα (α=1, 2, 3) class of poverty measures viz., poverty gap ratio Squared poverty gap and cubic poverty gap under Parametric Model for analysing spatial and inter temporal changes during the years 2009–10 and 2011–12.
Poverty, consumption expenditure
