The Comparison of Old and New Poverty Measures in India

The measurement of poverty in developing county like India is one of the major tasks because the results that have been obtained from either calorie based or expenditure based measures is away from reality. On the basis of these results our welfare policies are formulated for poor people that will not cover the all poor. Only calorie intake cannot be appropriate measure of poverty, therefore government setup expert groups for reexamine the existing poverty measure time to time. The new major of Tendulker committee included education, health, electricity, clothing and footwear expenditure along with calorie intake that more appropriate than previous one. This paper reviewed the old and new poverty measures and presented comparison of these two (Lakdawala exert group in 1993 and Tendulker expert group in 2009) measures with the help of secondary data sources. We found that both methodologies based on the similar base but new one included more goods and services in household consumer expenditure, resultant the more people come under the new poverty line