different years and using different questionnaires to collect consumption expenditures. A direct comparison is only possible in 2004/05 (Figure 1 and Figure 2). For that year, the CES reports average consumption expenditures approximately 10 percent higher in rural areas, and 5 percent higher in urban areas, than in SCS. Average consumption does not capture all differences between the two surveys. Comparing the CES and SCS Health in 2004/05, shows that the consumption distributions in the two surveys are very close, with the SCS Health stochastically dominating the CES in the bottom of the distribution but the opposite is true above around $100 per month in 2011 PPP terms (Figure 3, top panels). The comparison of these surveys indicates that the consumption aggregate included in the CES surveys is systematically different than the consumption aggregate captured by the SCS Health and Education surveys. Hence, measures of poverty using the consumption aggregate from the SCS surveys cannot be compared to those using CES surveys.

On the other hand, SCS Health and Education surveys show higher average consumption in year 2017/18 than in previous vintages of the same survey (that is, years 2014 and 2007/08 for the Education survey, and 2014 and 2004/05 for the case of the Health survey). Going beyond the simple averages, a stochastic dominance analysis shows that the distribution of household consumption expenditures of the SCS Health 2017/18 survey is to the right of the distribution of the 2004/05 health survey (Figure 3, middle panels) and the same with respect to the 2014/15 health survey (Figure 3, bottom panels), for any poverty line below $300 per month. This could indicate that household consumption has increased for all those households at the bottom of the distribution and hence poverty is lower in 2017/18 than in previous years.

# **2.2. Non-official data sources**

The subsample of the IHDS survey that was collected in 2017 for three states (Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand) also shows an increase in mean consumption between 2011/12 and 2017. Real income, consumption and food expenditures grew at an annualized rate of 3.5 percent, 2.7 percent and 1.9 percent, respectively. This is indicative because, historically, growth of consumption expenditure reported in the CES has been faster than in IHDS, although average consumption is higher in IHDS than in CES. For instance, between 2004/05 and 2011/12, the mean real consumption per capita in rural India had average annual growth of 3.3 percent in CES and 2.1 percent in IHDS, as well as 3.8 and 2.9 percent, respectively, in urban areas (see Figure 1 and Figure 2).

The CP survey also shows an upward trend in average real consumption and incomes between 2014 and 2018, although it matters whether the comparison is carried out relative to 2014 or 2015. Comparing with respect to 2014, the growth incidence curves show positive consumption growth throughout the distribution with few exceptions (top panel of Figure 4). In contrast, if comparing with the respect to 2015, households below the 15<sup>th</sup> percentile experience a decline in real consumption in years 2016 and 2017, which then turns positive for all percentiles in 2018 (middle panel of Figure 4). This is because the bottom of the distribution grows very fast between 2014 and 2015 (bottom panel of Figure 4). The survey data collected by CMIE seems to indicate a 5