going by the expenditure survey data, equal distribution across the entire country would allow barely 40.2 rupees per person per day in expenditures. Raising the poverty line significantly above the current level must confront this limit with regard to the scope for redistribution.

It could be argued that this discussion is based on the expenditure data in the expenditure survey, which underestimates true expenditures. The scope for redistribution might be significantly greater if we go by expenditures as measured in the National Accounts Statistics. The response to this criticism is that the surveys underestimate not just the average national expenditure, but also the expenditures of those identified as poor. Depending on the extent of this underestimation, the need for redistribution itself would be overestimated.

Even so, it is useful to test the limits of redistribution by considering the average expenditure according to the National Accounts Statistics. The total private final consumption expenditure at current prices in 2009-10 was 37,959.01 billion rupees. Applying the population figure of 1.174 billion as of January 1, 2010 in the NSSO 200910 expenditure survey, this total annual expenditure translates into daily expenditure of 88.58 rupees per person. This figure includes certain items such as imputed rent on owner occupied housing and expenditures other than those by households such as the expenditures of civil society groups, which would not be available for redistribution. Thus, per-capita expenditures achievable through equal distribution, even when we consider the expenditures as per the national accounts statistics, is likely to by modest.

To appreciate further the folly of setting too high a poverty line for purposes of identifying the poor, recall that the national average poverty line was 22.2 rupees per person per day in rural areas and 28.26 rupees in urban areas in 2009-10. Going by the expenditure estimates for different expenditure classes in Government of India (2011a), raising these lines to just 33.3 and 45.4 rupees, respectively, would place 70% of the rural and 50% of the urban population in poverty in 2009-10. If we went a little further and set the rural poverty line at 39 rupees per day and the urban poverty line at 81 rupees per day in 2009-10, we would place 80 percent of the population in each region below the poverty line. Will the fate of the destitute not be compromised if the meager tax revenues available for redistribution were thinly spread on this much larger population?<sup>10</sup>

# **6. Poverty at the National Level**

Official poverty estimates are available at the national and state levels for the entire population but not by social or religious groups for all years during which the NSSO conducted quinquennial surveys. Excluding the 1999-2000 survey, which became non-comparable to other quinquennial surveys due to a change in sample design, these years consist of 1973-74, 1977-78, 1983, 1987-88, 1993-94, 2004-05 and 2009-10<sup>11</sup> . The Planning Commission has published poverty ratios for the first six of these surveys at the

> 10 Recently, Panagariya (2013) has suggested that if political pressures necessitate shifting up the poverty line, the government should opt for two poverty lines, the Tendulkar line, which allows it to track those in extreme poverty, and a higher one that is politically more acceptable in view of the rising apsirations of the people.

> 11 Data from the 2011-12 Survey is now available – see Panagariya and More (2013).

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