Alagh Committee on poverty estimation
- Till 1979, the approach to estimate poverty was traditional i.e. lack of income.
- It was later decided to measure poverty precisely as starvation i.e. in terms of how much people eat.
- This approach was first of all adopted by the YK Alagh Committee’s recommendation in 1979 whereby, the people consuming less than 2100 calories in the urban areas or less than 2400 calories in the rural areas are poor.
- The logic behind the discrimination between rural and urban areas was that the rural people do more physical work. Moreover, an implicit assumption was that the states would take care of the health and education of the people.
Thus, YK Alagh eventually defined the first poverty line in India