Ending extreme poverty in India
Hindustan TimesTwo recent working papers, one by economists Sutirtha Sinha Roy and Roy van der Weide, at the World Bank, and another co-authored by Surjit Bhalla, an executive director at the IMF along with Arvind Virmani and Karan Bhasin have given alternative estimates for poverty in India for the period after 2011. Bhalla and his co-authors argue that extreme poverty has almost vanished, whereas the WB paper argues that it is still around 10%. Bhalla et al have relied on their old method of using National Account Statistics data as they have always believed that CES underestimates consumption spending and hence overestimates poverty. Last but not the least, Bhalla and his co-authors are right in arguing that abolition of extreme poverty as per their data should not mean an end of anti-poverty programmes in India.