might find it useful to have readily available in one place the poverty lines and associated poverty estimates for various social and religious groups over a long period and across India’s largest states in rural and urban areas.

The literature on poverty in India is vast and many of the contributions or references to the contributions can be found in Srinivasan and Bardhan (1974, 1988), Fields (1980), Tendulkar (1998), Deaton and Dreze (2002), Bhalla (2002) and Deaton and Kozel (2005). Panagariya (2008) provides a comprehensive treatment of the subject until the mid-2000s including the debates on whether or not poverty had declined in the post-reform era and whether or not reforms had been behind the acceleration in growth rates and the decline in poverty. Finally, several of the contributions in Bhagwati and Panagariya (2012a, 2012b) analyze various aspects of poverty in India using the expenditures surveys up to 2004-05. In particular, Cain, Hasan and Rana (2012) study the impact of openness on poverty, Mukim and Panagariya (2012) document the decline in poverty across social groups, Dehejia and Panagariya (2012) provide evidence on the growth in entrepreneurship in services sectors among the socially disadvantaged groups and Hnatkovska and Lahiri (2012) provide evidence on and reasons for narrowing wage inequality between the socially disadvantaged groups and the upper castes.

To our knowledge, this is the first paper to systematically and comprehensively exploit the expenditure survey conducted in 2009-10. This is important because growth was 2 to 3 percentage points higher between the 2004-05 and 2009-10 surveys than between any other prior surveys. As such we are able to study the differential impact accelerated growth has had on poverty alleviation both directly, through improved employment and wage prospects for the poor, and indirectly, through the large-scale redistribution program known as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which enhanced revenues made possible. In addition, ours is the first paper to comprehensively analyze poverty across religious groups. In studying the progress in combating poverty across social groups, the paper complements our previous work, Mukim and Panagariya (2012).

The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we discuss the history and design of the expenditure surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey office (NSSO), which form the backbone of all poverty analysis in India. In Section 3, we discuss the rising discrepancy between average expenditures as reported by the NSSO surveys and by the National Accounts Statistics (NAS) of the Central Statistical Office (CSO). In Section 4, we describe in detail the evolution of official poverty lines in India while in Section 5 we discuss some recent controversies regarding the level of the official poverty line. In Sections 6-9, we present the poverty estimates. In Section 6, we provide estimates by social and religious groups in rural and urban areas at the national level. In Section 7, we report the estimates for the total population in rural and urban areas of the largest 17 states, which account for 95 percent of India’s population. In Section 8, we offer state-level poverty estimates by social groups and in Section 9 by religious groups in the 17 states. In Section 10, we discuss inequality over time in rural and urban areas of the 17 states. In Section 11, we conclude.

2