Methodological slips in the poverty estimation
exercise in India has reached a juncture where one is reminded of the point
made by Karl Marx that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as
farce (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon). The tragedy occurred
in the late nineties, precisely in 1997, when the government decided to divide
the population into Below Poverty Line (BPL) and Above
Poverty Line (APL) in order to target subsidized food, based on
poverty lines which had been wrongly (under)estimated over the past two
decades. Subsequently, it was discovered that the poverty lines, based on
declared nutritional norms (and hence was accepted as an appropriate tool for
targeting food subsidies), have since long deviated from the prescribed norms in
the original methodology. This methodological slip proved tragic for millions
who were in need for subsidized food from the Public Distribution System but
were excluded on the basis of the under-estimated poverty lines, multiplying
their chances to be gripped in a state of chronic hunger and wasted life.
Once the original methodological gaffe
was unmasked, an expert group was constituted by the government to review the
poverty estimation methodology, popularly known as the Tendulkar Committee (TC
henceforth). The new methodology proposed by the TC in 2009 has now been
accepted by the government and the 2009-10 poverty estimates recently published
(33.2% for rural and 20.9% for urban India) are based on this changed
methodology. Unfortunately, far from the correcting the original methodological
error, the TC in its bid to rescue the poverty estimates from the awkward
clutches of nutritional requirements of the population, ended up rationalizing
and providing an apology for the underestimation of poverty in the country. In
the process, a more fundamental methodological goof-up is committed, this time
in the very approach to poverty measurement. The TC methodology has now
officially made poverty estimation normless, thereby rendering the
new poverty estimates as a farce. Needless to say, the other
problem of non-comparability of poverty lines over time and space has persisted
with this detachment of any ‘norm’ to poverty estimates.
At the first instance, the proposition that the
TC has build up an apology for underestimation of poverty may seem odd to many
given that their estimates for rural India for 2004-5 was much higher at 41.8%
than the corresponding 28.3% estimated by the old methodology. However if we
study the actual problems in the estimation process of the old methodology and
the inappropriate way in which the TC has tried to address that, this
proposition will be clearer to us.
Shortcomings of the old
methodology
The major caveat of the planning commission
poverty lines was gross underestimation of poverty with the degree of
underestimation amplifying with time. The original norm of 2400 Kcal per day
per capita for rural areas and 2100 Kcal per day per capita for urban areas was
applied by the 1979 Task force of the planning commission for the year 1973-74
to estimate poverty. The corresponding Monthly Percapita Consumption
Expenditure (MPCE) levels for the 1973-74 NSS round at which these norms can be
achieved was designated as the poverty line and the proportion of the
population below that line gave the corresponding poverty estimates. The
poverty lines and estimates for the subsequent rounds of NSS consumption
expenditure surveys (normally every 5 years) were determined by updating the
1973-74 poverty lines by price indices (CPI-AL and CPI-IW), separately for
rural and urban areas. In actuality, the calorie norm originally applied
in 1973-74 was less than the recommended cut-off. It was actually 2200 Kcal for
rural areas and 2000 Kcal for urban areas, as shown by subsequent enquiries
(Patnaik, 2007, 2010), though this was never made official.
What has happened over the years is that the
successive poverty lines have progressively deviated from the original calorie
norm on which they were based. So much so that by 2004-5, the calorie intake
possible at the official poverty line was only 1820 Kcal per capita per day;
380 Kcal below the original 2200 Kcal. Similar deviations occurred for urban
areas also and by 2004-5, the poverty line allowed a calorie intake of only
1835 Kcal; 165 Kcal less than the original 2000 Kcal (ibid). The fact that the
poverty lines of the different years (and also across states) embodied varying
normative energy intakes implies that the corresponding poverty estimates were
temporally (and spatially) non-comparable. In other words, as the yardstick for
determining whether a person is poor or not kept changing for the different
rounds, the declining trend in poverty estimates that can be observed in
successive rounds is a specious trend. In actuality, it is brought about by
lowering the norm for every successive exercise of poverty estimation.
The poverty estimates have been rendered
spurious over time primarily due to the mechanical fashion in which the CPI-AL
and the CPI-IW was used for rural and urban areas to update poverty lines.
This indirect method of generating successive poverty lines by
updating the original line solely by a general price index has major
weaknesses, which depleted the scientific and technical credibility of the
poverty estimates over the last three decades.
The consumption basket that is used for poverty
estimation remains unchanged over the successive rounds of poverty estimation
over three decades. This has no rationale as there are continuous structural
changes in the economy which are not captured by a general price index. The
latter can only help in accounting for the factor of inflation within a period
of time. A mere updating of poverty lines accounting only for inflation does
not account for the changes in the intrinsic character of the consumption basket
itself over time.
The change in the character of the basket
occurs precisely due to numerous structural changes in the economy which
general price indices cannot capture. For example, say an agricultural labourer
receives a part of her wages in kind, in terms of rice valued at farm gate
prices. The remaining rice that she requires for her household is procured at a
higher retail market price. Thus, the average price at which she consumes rice
is a weighted average of the farm gate and retail prices. When the same person
starts receiving her wages entirely in cash at some later point of time, it
means that she has to buy her entire requirement of rice from the market at the
retail price, which would be definitely higher than the earlier weighted average
price that she was paying. The same amount of money that she earlier spent on
rice consumption would allow her to procure a lesser physical quantity of rice
with lesser embodiment of calories. Given that she still wants to consume the
same amount of rice which allows her to intake the same amount of energy that
she has been doing earlier, she has to ceteris paribus increase
the share for rice in her total consumption budget. One should note that all
this can happen even when the price of rice in the economy remains invariant.
Similar such structural changes that
continually occur within an economy imply that the ‘true’ changes in the cost
of living are not captured by prices alone. Thus, it is amply clear that the
more appropriate way to capture poverty is by directly using certain norms
regarding basic essentials like food, clothing, shelter, etc. and by sticking
to the norms over specific time periods. The direct method of assessing levels
of consumption relative to the ‘norm’ in different years implicitly takes into
account the structural changes in the economy, which the official indirect
method had missed out. The calorie norm is one such benchmark and similar norms
for other commodities can also be used to account for them explicitly, though
they had been implicitly accounted for in the original exercise in 1973-4.
Tendulkar Committee: More of
the same fallacies?
The new methodology for poverty estimation
suggested by the TC somewhat recognizes the shortcomings of the earlier
methodology discussed above but commits certain fundamental errors at the same
time. The committee has now suggested a new Poverty Line Basket (PLB) instead
of any fixed norm. The urban national poverty line for 2004-05 estimated by the
earlier methodology has been recommended as the new PLB. The earlier practice
of differential norm for rural and urban areas has been replaced by this
universal PLB for the whole economy. This All-India urban PLB is then projected
for the various states to obtain the state-level urban poverty line using
national-state price differentials. The state-specific rural-urban price
differentials are then used to estimate the rural poverty lines for the various
states. Finally, the rural All-India poverty line is estimated as a weighted
average of state rural poverty lines (using population shares as weights).
The revised rural poverty line for 2004-05 was
MPCE Rs. 446.7 below which 41.8 per cent of the rural population lay. This has
now been accepted by the government. For all India in 2004-5, the revised
poverty estimate is 37.2 percent. The TC methodology when used on the 2009-10
NSS Consumption data (Mixed Recall Period) gives us the 2009-10 poverty lines
for rural and urban India; an MPCE of Rs. 672.8 (rural) and Rs. 859.6 (urban).
The corresponding poverty estimates are 33.2% in rural India and 20.9% in urban
India. This indeed reveals a massive decline in poverty, 8% in rural and 4.8%
(from 25.7% in 2004-05) in urban India, regarding which the ruling
establishment in this country has gone euphoric!
Why and how are these poverty estimates and the
corresponding declines that they exhibit purely bogus? The answer lies in
studying a set of fundamental errors committed and mythical assumptions adopted
by the TC in developing the new methodology. The major weakness of the TC
recommendations lies in the domain of fixing the PLB for poverty line
determination. The committee has stated that it is purposefully moving away
from the ‘calorie anchor’ of poverty estimation citing problems with the
nutrition data published by the NSS. Instead, they have chosen the urban
poverty line basket for 2004-05 as the base PLB for both urban and rural areas.
There are at least three problems that can be identified with this choice and
the rationale behind it.
First, in its attempt to move away from the
calorie norm, the new methodology actually moved away from fixing any norm for
poverty measurement in the country. Instead, the TC has fixed a particular
consumption basket as the PLB. This essentially embodies a norm-less measurement
of poverty in the country. Any consumption basket is only a ‘tool’ that
represents a certain norm or benchmark for measuring poverty. Replacing a norm by
the tool itself for measuring poverty implies a continuation
and perhaps intensification of the earlier arbitrariness that has plagued
poverty estimation. The answer to the problem of using an unchanging
consumption basket for estimating the poverty line (old methodology) that
increasingly got detached from a declared benchmark is not to change the consumption
basket arbitrarily, but to ensure that the consumption basket changes so as to
represent some fixed norm of poverty measurement at different points of time.
Without the latter, poverty estimates are not comparable over time.
Not only does this simple logic escape the
reason of the TC, but by abolishing the very use of norms for poverty
measurement, the TC has circumvented the shortcomings of the earlier
methodology without addressing them. In case the committee believed that the
calorie norm is inappropriate for measuring poverty (more on this later), it
would have been useful if they had suggested some new and improved norm without
altogether ignoring the fundamental dimension of hunger in poverty.
Secondly, the argument that the nutrition data
of the NSS has problems and it is better to measure poverty indirectly using
the MPCE figures is a myth. The NSS collects data on the monthly consumption of
different food and non-food items in its Consumption Expenditure Survey (CES).
It then uses the unit prices for these items to reach the monthly per capita
expenditure (MPCE) figures which are published in the CES. On the other hand,
the same physical quantities of food items when multiplied by their unit
calorie values provide the nutritional intake of the population. There is not
much scope of error in the unit calorie values of different food items, given
they are scientifically determined and not amenable to any significant change
over time. If at all there is some error, it has to be with the consumption
survey itself, in which case the PLB based on MPCE data which is chosen as the
new benchmark will also be affected by some such errors.
Thirdly and most importantly, the choice of the
urban poverty line for 2004-05 as the new PLB for determining the poverty line
is grossly erroneous. The committee betrays a certain amount of naiveté when it
mentions ‘The estimated urban share of the poor population […] in 2004-05
[…] is generally accepted as being less controversial than its rural
counterpart […] that has been heavily criticized as being too low’ (GOI,
2009). When both the rural and urban poverty lines have been estimated by the
same erroneous methodology, it is generically not possible that one can be an
underestimation even as the other capturing poverty accurately. Patnaik (2010)
shows that for the urban areas, the poverty line accounted for only 1835 Kcal,
265 Kcal (165 Kcal from 2000 Kcal) below the prescribed norm and the proportion
of people below 2100 Kcal in 2004-05 in urban areas was 64.2 percent, 38.5
percent above the official estimate of 25.7 percent.
Fixing this urban poverty line basket of
2004-05, which has been derived after systematically underestimating poverty
levels for three decades, as the new starting point for measuring poverty by
the TC effectively means that the latter has forwarded an apology for the
earlier errors as well as made an official endorsements of the wrongs that has
been done to the poor of this country. Indeed, the TC methodology is not for
poverty estimation but a method for ‘systematically underestimating poverty’.
One can meaningfully stop this argument at this
point and debunk the new poverty estimates arrived at by the TC methodology.
However, the hollowness of the claims and rationalization made by the TC regarding
its methodology deserve not to go without comment.
An important claim of the TC is that by
shifting from the use of general price indices like the CPI-AL/CPI-IW to ‘cost
of living’ indices (CoL), it has prevented the systemic and progressive
underestimating of poverty that the earlier methodology was essentially leading
to. The CoL indices are constructed using the household level unit values for
different commodities/commodity groups (as many as 23 groups). This reveals the
misplaced obsession with an indirect and cumbersome method of estimating
poverty using some kind of price or other, when many direct indicators are
available (not only nutritional intakes but also indicators of health, housing,
etc) that can be used for estimating the poor population.
The claim that CoL indices actually account for
the structural changes in the consumption patterns of the population is also
not foolproof. Take the following example: A household shifts from consumption
of rice/wheat to small millets over time due to stress in their earnings. The
CoL index constructed for cereals will be unable to account for this change.
Small millets which have a much lower price and unit value (but also much lower
calories embodied in them) will keep the CoL index for cereals at a lower level
even as the total calories embodied in this changed cereal basket will be much
lower than the rice/wheat basket. Any change in quality of goods consumed
cannot be captured by the CoL based on the unit values. Thus, with the existing
caveat of prices not capturing structural changes accurately enough persisting
with the CoL indices, one can raise a question regarding the adoption of this
much more complicated methodology for estimating poverty.
The other important claim of improvement in the
methodology is the inclusion of education and health expenditures explicitly
within the PLB. A closer scrutiny of the method of updating poverty lines over
time reveals that these crucial items such as education and health are clubbed
together with other items like entertainment, etc. into a ‘miscellaneous’ group
and this latter group is updated by the general price indices as was done in
the old methodology (GOI, 2009, page 25-26). In the absence of any prescribed
acceptable norms for education or health status at the poverty line, it is more
probable that within a short span of time, these expenditures at the poverty
line would be such that cannot account for any decent quantum of education or
health (similar to what happened with nutritional attainments at the old
poverty lines).
Reading the Tendulkar Committee report, one
perceives a sense of ambiguity amongst the authors after deriving the poverty
lines and estimates. This is reflected in the multiple rationalizations that
they resort to in order to prove their estimated poverty line as realistic. In
this convoluted exercise of rationalization, what are the parameters that they
fall back upon? Surprisingly, the report first takes refuge in that so-called
‘irrelevant’ (and already rejected by the TC itself) parameter of ‘calorie
intake’ at the poverty line.
The TC’s own findings reveal that the urban PLB
for 2004-05 can provide for 1776 Kcal per capita per day. The FAO Minimum
Dietary Energy Requirement (MDER) for India for 2004-6 (1770 Kcal) is quoted by
them to justify this very low calorie intake at the new urban poverty line. In
such an argument, it is ignored that the MDER specified by the FAO is by
definition the minimum dietary intake required by the
population ‘for maintaining a healthy life and carrying out a light
physical activity’ (emphasis added by author, Glossary, FAO). If one
checks the FAO document ‘Country Profile: Food Security Indicators’ for India
(available at the following link ‘http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/ess/documents/food_security_statistics/country_profiles/eng/India_E.pdf accessed
on 24 March 2012), which gives these MDER figures, one cannot miss from the
next line of information that the FAO also conceptualizes an ‘Average Dietary
Energy Requirement’ (ADER) higher than the MDER (summarized for various years
in Table 1). The ADER specifies the ‘amount of dietary energy per person that
is considered adequate to meet the energy needs for heavy activity and
good health’ (ibid).
1: FAO MDER and ADER (in
Kcal) for India: various years
|
Year
|
1990-92
|
1995-97
|
2000-02
|
2004-06
|
2006-08
|
|
MDER
|
1740
|
1750
|
1760
|
1770
|
1780
|
|
ADER
|
2180
|
2200
|
2220
|
2240
|
2250
|
By ignoring the ADER, which is more appropriate
for a society where large segments of the population is engaged in hard
physical labour in agriculture, mining, construction or the exploitative
informal economy, the TC has betrayed its objective of manipulating living
standards for the purpose of proving their estimates as correct. The poverty
lines that have been reached at can thus be designated as some measure which is
irrelevant for the poor, working population of this country, perhaps more
relevant for the urban sedentary office worker. Utter disdain for the labour of
the working poor which has created the riches of this society is wholesomely reflected
in this rationalization by the committee.
Several studies have noted that a higher
dietary intake is required for maintaining a healthy life taking into account
men and women performing hard physical labour in the economy. The Challenge of
Hunger 2007 published by the IFPRI rightly notes, ‘FAO’s measure of the
proportion of the population with calorie deficiency is, however, based on the
minimum and not the average dietary energy requirements, and therefore it
cannot capture the proportion of people whose calorie supply lies between these
two thresholds’ (IFPRI 2007, Part I, Endnote 13, Page 20). The report
also notes that the average norm is particularly crucial for South Asia, and
specifically India, where a significantly large proportion of the population
lies between these two thresholds (ibid, Page 10). Weisman and Smith
(2007) classified the deprivation below the two norms (minimum and average)
as ‘Food Energy Deficiency’ and ‘Severe Food Energy Deficiency’. Patnaik (2007)
has termed the proportion of the population below 1800 Kcal as the ‘depth of
poverty’ even as she measured the incidence of poverty using higher norms.
The other rationalization tool used by the TC
is the set of ex-post external validation checks whether the actual
expenditures on food, education and health at the poverty line can allow decent
standards of consumption of these items. This is where the TC finally remembers
that poverty estimation must satisfy some ‘norm’. The adequacy tests carried
out for 2004-05 show that at the poverty line, the food expenditures are
satisfied for 17 and 19 states (out of the 20 major states) respectively for
rural and urban areas. What needs to be noted is that the parameter used for
arriving what food expenditure is adequate is the Body Mass Index (BMI). The
relevance of BMI (ratio of weight to square of height) for measuring adequacy
is questionable in a country where there is a widespread incidence of child
under-nourishment and malnutrition. The latter not only causes wasting (low
body-weight) but also stunting (low height) rendering the BMI as largely
misleading (also pointed out by Patnaik, 2010).
The TC does not give the information on how
many states satisfied the adequacy tests for education and health but Himanshu
(2010) provides that. The latter reveals that among the 20 major states, only
12 and 10 states in rural and urban respectively had education and health
expenditures at the poverty line that satisfied 90% of the normative
expenditure. Fewer states actually reach the norm. This also raises serious
doubts over how properly education and health expenditures were actually
accounted for by the TC methodology, one of their important claims of
improvement.
An apology is instantaneously forwarded that
these shortfalls at the poverty lines are on account of hospitalization and not
due to education or non-institutional treatment (ibid, GoI, 2009, page 9). Of
course, we are supposed to remember here that in the age of neo-liberalism, the
poor working population is not only ‘not entitled’ to adequate food-energy but
are also not expected to tread into a hospital when they fall sick from
over-working and under-nutrition!
The 2009-10 poverty lines:
the critique validated
Much of our anticipated criticism of the
Tendulkar Committee methodology is substantiated by the new poverty estimates
for 2009-10 that the Planning Commission has recently published. Using the NSS
data on nutrition and consumption from the Nutritional Intakes in
India, 2009-10 (Report no. 540) and Level and Pattern of
Consumption Expenditure, 2009-10 (Report No. 538) and applying the
direct methodology (Patnaik, 2007), we can estimate the nutritional intakes
that are allowed by the new poverty lines. The rural poverty line for 2009-10
(MPCE Rs. 672.8) allows a calorie intake of 1880 Kcal per capita per day; 119
Kcal less than 1999 Kcal attainable at the 2004-05 rural poverty line. There is
a similar decline in the calorie intake possible at the urban poverty line for
2009-10 (MPCE Rs. 859.6) to 1730 Kcal per capita per day; 46 Kcal less than the
already low 1776 Kcal attainable at the 2004-05 PLB.
This decline not only implies that the poverty
lines are rendered non-comparable over time due to this change in the
associated material well-being parameters but also validates our criticism that
complicated CoL indices are still incapable of capturing structural changes in
the economy accurately. The problem is amplified now for the Planning
Commission and the ruling establishment in this country as their earlier
practice of invoking the FAO MDER figures is also not an option any more. Table
1 clearly shows that both the MDER and ADER figures published by FAO has
increased since 2004-06 (and also before this period), while the poverty line
dietary intakes have declined in 2009-10 compared to 2004-05.
The other rationalization usually put forward
is that higher calorie intakes are usually possible at the official poverty
lines but it is only the ‘voluntary’ diet diversification of the poor which
leads them to purchase lower calories at the poverty line. This apology also
falls flat upon preliminary speculation of the NSS nutrition data for 2004-05
and 2009-10 (NSS Report No. 513 and 540). The per capita per day protein
consumption for the 2004-05 rural poverty line (Rs. 446.7) MPCE class was 54.1
grams; the same figure for the 2009-10 rural poverty line class (a different
class now) is only 51.4 grams. For the same class (41-50% of the population)
which is now non-poor in 2009-10, the protein intake figure is still lower at
53.3 grams in 2009-10. Clearly people near the rural poverty line are consuming
lesser proteins (or definitely not increasing) also along with lesser dietary
energy intakes. In urban areas, the protein intake at the poverty line class in
2004-05 was 55.3 grams per capita per day; the figure for the poverty line
class (the same class in this case, 20-30% of the population) in 2009-10 is
substantially lower at 47.9 grams!
Generally the average protein and fat intakes
for the whole population has also declined between 2004-05 and 2009-10, the
only exception being the fat intake in urban areas, where the figures has
increased by a mere 0.4 grams. One can comprehend therefore what are the
dimensions of diet diversification occurring in India that many frequently cite
as an apology for falling food energy intakes! No amount of rationalization of
the poverty lines can stand in the face of the reality that rising
hunger-incidence in India in not only about calorie-deprivation but of a
serious decline in all nutritional indicators. With cereals still accounting
for 64.8% and 56.4% of the protein intakes in this country in 2009-10 (NSS
Report 540), it is only natural that the declining food-grains availability
under the neo-liberal policy regime has seriously jeopardized the food-intakes
of large segments of the population and handicapped them in their hourly battle
against hunger.
This author’s estimates show that 74.9 percent
of the rural population lies below a per capita per day calorie intake of 2200
Kcal (less than the FAO prescribed ADER) in 2009-10. In urban areas, 60.7
percent of the population has a calorie intake of less than per capita per day
2000 Kcal in 2009-10. In other words, the planning commission poverty lines
leave out roughly 42 per cent and 40 per cent of the population, who are
actually food-deprived, in rural and urban India respectively, from the scope
of their definition of the poor. Hunger has little correlation with poverty is
what we learn from the Planning Commission experts!
Any honest and transparent effort of poverty
estimation should have urged the Planning Commission to at least publish the
external validation checks (though even these checks are inappropriate
according to this author) for 2009-10 that the original exercise carried out
for 2004-05. Given the arbitrary manner in which these adequacy tests were
formulated, it is most probable that their linkages with the new poverty lines
have gone haywire and the authorities are in no position to publish them. But
without publishing these checks, the planning commission has no justification
for publishing the new poverty estimates if the body believes in minimum
transparency.
No matter what the ruling establishment tells
us, there is simply no case for accepting the government’s poverty estimates
and their spurious methodology for such estimates. Not only should these
claptrap poverty figures be not linked to any public social welfare programmes,
more so with food distribution, but the erroneous poverty estimation methodology
should be shelved altogether. The official poverty estimates are only of use to
those who have the unilateral objective of restricting public expenditures by
reducing the BPL estimates and for those who press for the continuation and
speeding up of the neo-liberal economic reforms. From the point of view of the
people of this country, there is no relevance for these misleading poverty
estimates. Their urgent need is for universal social welfare programmes that
cater to their basic needs.
The unwarranted and erroneous division of large
sections of the vulnerable population, mostly poor and laboring people, into
ill-founded categories of BPL and APL is a cruel joke that the ruling classes
are playing on them. However, the Indian rich elite of this country must not
ignore the message that a poster conveyed at a recent Occupy Wall Street
demonstration-‘One day the poor will have nothing left to eat but the rich’.
The reasons and pre-conditions of our own Occupy Movement are here.
References:
Government of India (1979) Report of
the Task Force on Projections of Minimum Needs and Effective Consumption Demand,
Planning Commission, New Delhi, January.
_________ (2009) Report of the Expert
Group to Review the Methodology for Estimation of Poverty, Planning
Commission, New Delhi, November.
_________ (2012) Nutritional Intakes in
India, 2009-10, NSS Report no. 540, Ministry of Statistics and Programme
Implementation
_________ (2012) Level and Pattern of
Consumption Expenditure, 2009-10, NSS Report no. 538, Ministry of Statistics
and Programme Implementation
_________ (2007) Nutritional Intakes in
India, 2004-5, NSS Report no. 513, Ministry of Statistics and Programme
Implementation
Food and Agricultural Organization, Glossary, www.fao.org
Himanshu (2010) ‘Towards New Poverty Lines for
India’ Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 45(1), pp: 38-48.
International Food Policy Research Institute
(2007) Global Hunger Index: Facts, Determinants and Trends, The
Challenge of Hunger 2007 report prepared in collaboration with Welt Hunger
Hilfe and Concern, Bonn, October.
Patnaik Utsa (2007) ‘Neoliberalism and Rural
Poverty in India’ Economic and Political Weekly, Vol 42(30), pp:
3132-3150.
Patnaik Utsa (2010) ‘Trends in Urban Poverty
under Economic Reforms: 1993-94 to 2004-05’ Economic and Political
Weekly, Vol 45(4), pp: 42-53.
Smith, Lisa C. and Doris Weismann (2007) ‘Is
Food Insecurity More Severe in South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa?’, IFPRI
Discussion Paper 712, IFPRI, Washington.
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