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Why India has no official poverty line since 2014

Published 6 November 2026

India has not published an official poverty line since 2014. The last official poverty estimates are for 2011-12. Every poverty number quoted since then comes from the World Bank, from NITI Aayog’s Multidimensional Poverty Index, or from researchers applying old methods to new data. Here is how that happened, and what it means for every number since.

The last official line

India’s official poverty line comes from the Tendulkar Committee. The committee was set up by the Planning Commission in 2005 under Suresh Tendulkar, and it reported in 2009. It made a decisive break with the past: instead of defining poverty by calorie intake, it defined it by consumption expenditure, using a uniform poverty line basket for rural and urban India and explicitly counting private spending on health and education.

On that method, the national poverty line for 2011-12 was set at 816 rupees per person per month in rural areas and 1,000 rupees per person per month in urban areas. That is about 27 rupees a day in a village and 33 rupees a day in a town. The poverty rate for 2004-05 on this method was 37.2 percent, considerably higher than earlier official estimates.

The Tendulkar line remains the official poverty line. It is the basis of the current official poverty estimates. The problem is that those estimates stop at 2011-12, because the survey they rest on is the last one that was published.

The line that was never adopted

The Tendulkar line was criticised as too low, so the Planning Commission set up a second committee under C. Rangarajan in 2012. It reported in June 2014. It reverted to separate rural and urban poverty line baskets, and it set the bar higher: 972 rupees per person per month in rural areas and 1,407 rupees in urban areas, at 2011-12 prices. That is about 32 rupees a day in a village and 47 rupees a day in a town.

On the Rangarajan method, 29.5 percent of Indians were below the poverty line in 2011-12, against 21.9 percent on the Tendulkar method for the same year. The difference is the basket: Rangarajan counted more of the things a household actually has to pay for, including education, health care, rent, and transport.

The government did not adopt the Rangarajan line. It did not take a call on the report. So India has two published poverty lines for 2011-12, one official and one not adopted, and no official line for any year after that.

The survey that was scrapped

The reason there is no official line for later years is that there was no survey to build one from.

India’s consumption survey is run every five years by the National Sample Survey Office. The last one published was the 68th round, covering July 2011 to June 2012. The next one, the 75th round, covered July 2017 to June 2018. In November 2019, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation decided not to release it, citing data quality issues and a significant divergence in consumption patterns.

A leaked version of the survey showed why the decision was sensitive. Monthly per capita consumption spending had fallen in real terms by 3.7 percent, from 1,501 rupees in 2011-12 to 1,446 rupees in 2017-18. That was the first fall since 1972-73. The ministry said the survey had quality problems and was at variance with administrative data. Whether that was the full reason is a matter of debate, but the fact is not: the survey was scrapped, and with it went the basis for a new official poverty estimate.

The next consumption survey, the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey for 2022-23, was released in February 2024. That is an eleven-year gap between published consumption surveys. It is the survey the World Bank now uses for its India poverty estimates, and it is the survey researchers use when they apply the Rangarajan method to new data.

What fills the gap

So when you read a poverty figure for India today, it comes from one of three places, and none of them is an official poverty line.

The first is the World Bank, which applies its own international lines ($3 a day for extreme poverty, $4.20 for lower-middle-income countries) to the 2022-23 and 2023-24 consumption surveys. The second is NITI Aayog’s Multidimensional Poverty Index, which does not use income at all and is built from the National Family Health Survey. The third is researchers, including economists at the Reserve Bank of India, who have applied the Rangarajan framework to the new 2022-23 data to produce updated estimates on that method.

All three are legitimate, and all three are worth reading. But none of them is the government stating, as it did for 2011-12, that this is the official poverty line and this is the share of Indians below it. The government has not announced a new official poverty line, and it has not said when it will.

That is the gap to keep in mind. Every poverty number for India since 2014 rests on a definition chosen by someone other than the government, or on a line from 2011-12 applied to new data. When you see a figure, ask which definition it uses. There is no single official answer to check it against.

Sources

These sources are also listed on the Sources page.

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Updated 9 November 2026