ENGEL CURVE METHOD FOR MEASURING POVERTY

Abstract

While the headcount index of poverty in India has fallen, per capita cereal consumption and calorie intake have also decreased. At the poverty line, the minimum calorie requirements used for defining this line in the base year are not being met in later years. While the official poverty line used the food requirement norm from nutrition science, this paper employs the food consumption requirement derived from the Engel curve as the norm to arrive at a measure of food consumption deprivation. It is shown that food deprivation levels do not reflect the same pattern that the traditional poverty indices depict, questioning the usefulness of traditional poverty indices for measuring food deprivation.