Book review
Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, gave the keynote address in the opening session chaired by Shanta Devarajan, Chief Economist for South Asia at the World Bank. The research papers contained in the volume grew out of a workshop sponsored by the Planning Commission and the World Bank in New Delhi in January 2002.
The poverty debate covered by this volume started up in the late 1990s when poverty measures based on the National Sample Surveys----the data used for all official measurement of poverty in India---began showing a slower decline in poverty than that suggested by the growth in the measure of average consumption from the National Income Accounts statistics. The debate was fuelled by the release of the data from the 1999/2000 National Sample Survey, which included design changes that made it difficult to compare its results with earlier surveys. The official estimates from the 1999/2000 Survey, which were published in February 2001, showed a very large decline in poverty rates, and did nothing to settle the debate. The joint Planning Commission-World Bank workshop in 2002 was a response to this situation, and led to the papers contained in the Great Indian Poverty Debate. "The volume highlights the many sides to this debate, and its release now is very timely because of the lessons that it suggests for the evolution of poverty measurement in India, particularly as we await the data from the next major round of the National Sample Survey that will be available to researchers in early 2006," said Shekhar Shah, Economic Advisor for South Asia at the World Bank,



About the author Angus Deaton, Professor of Economics at Princeton University, and Valerie Kozel, Senior Economist at the World Bank.