# **1 Introduction**

Household consumption expenditure surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey (NSS) organization are the main source of poverty and inequality statistics in India. These surveys support the development of major data-driven policies in India and are used as inputs in the estimation of GDP and India’s consumer price index (CPI).<sup>1</sup> The latest NSS expenditure survey that is publicly available for India is from 2011. As the Indian economy has undergone significant changes since then, the release of the 201718 round of the survey had been eagerly anticipated. Unfortunately, it was ultimately decided to withhold the unit level survey data and its main results.<sup>2</sup> Using leaked estimates of the empirical distribution function of household consumption, Subramanian (2019) shows that poverty increased in rural India between 2011 and 2017 and that consumption inequality moderated (both in rural and urban areas). The rise in rural poverty neither sits well with consumption trends reported in national accounts data nor with proxy indicators of household welfare derived from official and non-official sources (including labor force surveys, surveys on agricultural household incomes, national family and health surveys of DHS, nighttime lights, etc.).

In the absence of an official consumption survey, several studies have attempted to fill the gap in poverty and inequality data by exploiting alternative data sources. Newhouse and Vyas (2019) and Edochie et al. (2022) impute household consumption into different choices of non-expenditure surveys, namely the Survey of Expenditure on Services and Durables (conducted in 2014-15) and the Survey on Social Consumption on Health (conducted in 2017-18). Chen, et al. (2018) and Felman, et al. (2019) predict growth in mean household consumption based on national accounts data.<sup>3</sup> Bhalla, Bhasin and Virmani (2022) build predictions using night-time lights and changes in state gross domestic product data. Desai (2020) estimates poverty using consumption data obtained from a sub-round of the India Human Development Survey conducted in 2017<sup>4,5</sup> . All studies report a reduction in headcount poverty in India in the years

> 1Given that approximately 18 percent of the worlds population lives in India, its poverty and inequality numbers are also crucial for any efforts to track global poverty, see e.g. Chen and Ravallion (2010).

> 2The government raised concerns about the quality of the NSS-2017 household expenditure data according to the following press release: https://pib.gov.in/Pressreleaseshare.aspx?PRID=1591792.

> 3The relationship between poverty reduction and growth in India has been studied earlier in Datt and Ravallion (2011). See also the cross-country study by Ravallion (2012) on the intricate relationship between poverty and growth.

> 4Desai (2020) is limited to only three states in India, namely Uttarakhand, Bihar and Rajasthan.

> 5More recently, Gupta, Malani and Woda (2021b) use consumption data from the Consumer Pyramid Household Survey to directly estimate poverty for 2019. However, the paper makes no attempt to make newly obtained estimates of poverty comparable to estimates for 2011, preventing assessments of how poverty evolved after 2011

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