# **7. Poverty in the States: Rural and Urban**

We now turn to the progress made in poverty alleviation in different states. Though our focus in the paper is on poverty by social and religious groups, we first consider it at the aggregate level in rural and urban areas. India has 28 states and 7 union territories. To keep the analysis manageable, we limit ourselves to the 17 largest states.<sup>15</sup> Together, these states account for 95 percent of the total population. We exclude all seven union territories including Delhi; the smallest six of the seven northeastern states (retaining only Assam); and the states of Sikkim, Goa, Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal. Going by the expenditure survey of 2009-10, each of the included states has a population exceeding 20 million while each of the excluded states has a population less than 10 million. Among the union territories, only Delhi has a population exceeding 10 million.

# _7.1. Rural and Urban Populations_

We begin by presenting, in Table 6, the total population in each of the 17 largest states and its distribution between rural and urban areas as revealed by the NSSO expenditure survey of 2009-10.<sup>16</sup> The population totals in the expenditure survey are lower than the corresponding population projections by the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India (2006) as well as those implied by Census 2011.<sup>17</sup> Our choice is dictated by the fact that poverty estimates should be evaluated with reference to the population underlying the survey design instead of those suggested by external sources. For example, the urban poverty estimate in Kerala in 2009-10 must be related to the urban population in the state underlying the expenditure survey in 2009-10 instead of projections based on the Census 2001 and Census 2011.<sup>18</sup> According to Table 6, 27 percent of the national population lived in urban areas and the remaining 73 percent in the rural areas in 2009-10. This composition understates the true share of the urban population, which was revealed to be 31.2 percent in the Census 2011. The table shows ten states having populations of more than 50 million (60 million according to the Census 2011). We will refer to these ten states as the **large**

> 15 Although Delhi has its own elected legislature and Chief Minister, it remains a union territory.  For example, central home ministry has the effective control of the Delhi police through lieutenant governor who is the de jure head of the Delhi government and appointed by the Government of India.

> 16 Our absolute totals for rural and urban areas of the states and India in Table 6 match those in Tables 1AR and 1A-U, respectively, in Government of India (2011b).

> 17 The Planning Commission derives the absolute number of poor from poverty ratios using census-based population projections.  Therefore, the population figure underlying the absolute number of poor estimated by the Planning Commission are higher than those in Table 6, which are based on the expenditure survey of 2009-10.

> 18 This distinction is a substantive in the case of states in which the Censuses reveal the degree of urbanization to be very different than that underlying the design of the expenditure surveys.  For example, the expenditure survey of 2009-10 places the urban population in Kerala at 26 percent of the total in 200910.  But the Census 2011 finds the rate of urbanization in the state to be 47.7 percent.

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