Has Poverty Decline in India Faltered Since 2011/12?

Estimates of poverty in India post-2011/12 are subject to heated public and scholarly debate. The first official, nationally representative consumption survey after 2011/12 to be publicly released pertains to 2022/23. While this survey was also administered and fielded by India’s National Sample Survey Organization, the resulting consumption aggregate cannot be directly compared to that from the 2011/12 round due to far-reaching changes in consumption definition, questionnaire design, sampling, and survey organization. Moreover, since 2011/12 there has been no officially endorsed poverty line that updates the 2011/12 line with respect to inflation and spatial price variation. We confront these problems of non-comparability by employing survey-to-survey imputation methods in which consumption is predicted into the data for 2022/23 based on consumption models calibrated using data from 2011/12. We consider a range of model specifications and employ both the NSSO consumption surveys and Periodic Labour Force Surveys (PLFS). The latter allow us to also track poverty during the years between 2017 and 2022/3. All estimates indicate a significant slowing of poverty decline between 2011/12 and 2022/23 compared to the preceding decade. We report state-level trends alongside aggregate trends. We show that there have been sharp differences across states in their achievement of poverty decline.