Inequality matters
Radhicka Kapoor
That poverty in India has declined between 2004-05 and 2009-10 is indisputable. Poverty estimates based on the Tendulkar poverty line released last year indicated that poverty headcount ratio declined by 8%, 4.8% and 5.7% in rural, urban and all-India, respectively, during this period. This worked out to an annual decline of 1.64% and 0.92% in rural and urban India, respectively. Given that the average growth rate of GDP during this period was about 8.5%, exceeding 9% in three of the five years, and that the Eleventh Plan aimed to reduce poverty by 2 percentage points a year, this pace of poverty reduction is indeed disappointing. If economic growth was the only factor that mattered for poverty reduction, we should have witnessed greater poverty reduction. Moreover, states with the highest growth rate should have performed the best in terms of poverty reduction. But state-wise poverty estimates indicate that this is not the case. For instance, Bihar and Chhattisgarh witnessed average growth rates of about 10% during this period, yet poverty declined by less than 1%.
While growth is unquestionably necessary for substantial poverty reduction, it appears that growth is getting weakly linked with poverty reduction. In other words, the growth elasticity of poverty (GEP) is not high enough. GEP gives the percentage change in a chosen poverty measure in response to a 1 percentage change in
