Monday, August 19, 2002
OP-ED
FROM THE IVORY TOWER
Changing Calorific Norms And Poverty
N Chandra Mohan
Independence Day speeches from the ramparts of the Red Fort are occasions when the Prime Minister makes a vision statement of an India free from poverty and hunger. In his address on August 15, 2001, Mr Vajpayee thus stated that in the decade of the 1990s - which was when new economic policies were implemented - poverty has fallen and expressed confidence that abject poverty was on its way out.
The methodological basis for determining the poverty ratio or headcount numbers of the poor in the population is a fixed subsistence or food energy intake norm. According to the Task Force constituted by the Planning Commission in the late 1970s, the average calorific equivalent of that subsistence standard was 2435 Kcal and 2095 Kcal or Rs 49.87 and Rs 56.64 in 1973-74 prices for the rural and urban areas respectively.
Even to this day, this so-called poverty line or average calorific requirement has been kept invariant over time. The factor of change has been only with respect to the use of suitable price indexes to update the poverty line in order to estimate headcount poverty ratios over time. To be sure, there are differences between the estimates of the Planning Commission and those developed by eminent economists over the years. Regardless of such advances in poverty research, the calorific norm or subsistence standard has remained the same. But why should this remain invariant over time? What implications would changes in such calorific norms have on the poverty debate? Researchers may have posed these questions before, but only a few like Laveesh Bhandari and Amaresh Dubey* appear to have crunched out numbers to shed light on these questions.
Using household data of the National Sample Survey Organisation in 1993-94, the authors found that if the Task Force's methodology were strictly applied, the average calorific norms turned out to be lower at 2377 Kcal and 2079 Kcal in the rural and urban areas respectively. Thus when compared to the late 1970s, the calorific norm has somewhat declined in the 1990s rather than remain invariant.
The authors slightly modify the Task Force methodology and arrive at their own estimate of the average calorific norm in 1993-94. The changes largely pertain to recalculating the calorific requirement for the population above 40 years to get an overall estimate of 2316 Kcal and 2018 Kcal in the rural and urban areas respectively - which clearly imply that calorie requirements have declined from the Task Force's estimates.
The fact that average calorific requirements have been found to be lower in the 1990s - which holds even up to 2002 according to rough calculations by the authors of 2262 Kcal and 1983 Kcal in rural and urban areas respectively - clearly suggests that the average calorific norms in studies of poverty are being overestimated. By sticking to a invariant norm, academic research therefore is overestimating poverty ratios as well.
The big question is why the average calorific norms are declining? Are they a feature of development? The authors seem to think so. Life expectancy at birth and the dependency burden is rising. The male population in the 15-59 age group declined from 324 per 1,000 in 1970-75 to 215 during 1993-98. Sinc e this age group has the highest calorific requirement, their relative decline has perhaps contributed to the fall in the average calorific requirement.
Occupational shifts - in terms of the decline of physically demanding manual and growing number of sedentary jobs in services - are also possibly behind the reduced calorific requirements. Clearly, this matter calls for more research, but it does appear to make it easier for PM's to claim a faster drop in poverty in India.
*'Calorific deficiency, poverty and the public distribution system - a household level analysis for 1993-94', Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies, working paper series No 24, 2001.
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