Poverty in India since 1983: New Poverty Counts and Robust Poverty Comparisons

This is the third in a set of papers discussing Poverty Lines (PL) and poverty aggregates in India published in this journal (Dubey and Palmer-Jones, 2005a; 2005b. In earlier papers we criticised the Unit Value based CPIs and the method of computing PLs from these UV CPIs which have been proposed as an improvement over the official CPIs used to compute PLs and poverty by the Indian Planning Commission (PC) (Deaton and Tarrozi, 1999; Deaton, 2003a). We proposed some improvements but noted remaining lacunae. In this paper we report these PLs and the poverty aggregates we have calculated from them (without adjustment to the 55^th Round).