Food deprivation: A thali index reveals what poverty estimates do not

Poverty in India is typically estimated based on a poverty line that identifies the purchasing power needed to satisfy the daily calorific intake deemed necessary. In this post, Balakrishnan and Raj measure the standard of living in terms of a ‘thali meal’. Based on the extent of food deprivation that they find, they argue for a review of poverty measurement in India.

The National Sample Survey (NSS) published the Survey on Household Consumption Expenditure, 2023-24 (henceforth, HCES 2024) in January 2025. Following the release of this data, poverty estimates for India have been put forth by the State Bank of India (SBI) (2025) and the World Bank (2025) among other sources. These mostly follow the practice of establishing a poverty line based on consumption possibilities. In most cases, the poverty line identifies the purchasing power needed to satisfy the daily calorific intake deemed necessary, and the section of the population with consumption expenditure less than the poverty line is classified as poor. However, a measure of the standard of living in terms of tangible goods afforded would be at least as useful to have.

**The thali meal**

With this in mind, we translate the daily per capita value of consumption (denoted as ‘MPCE’, or monthly per capita consumption expenditure, by the NSS) of food into the number of thali meals that it would have commanded in 2023-24 across the population. The thali meal¹as a measure of the standard of living is intuitive enough, for it represents a recognisable unit of food intake across the country, even if the exact term for it may vary. We adopt two thali meals a day as the minimum acceptable standard of food consumption, and therefore the standard of living.

Computationally, this raises the question about the price of a thali to be used for estimating the real value of consumption of the population. A ready source of this information is the rating and analytics agency Crisil, which publishes the average cost of preparing a thali at home based on input prices prevailing in north, south, east and west India. For a vegetarian thali in 2023-24, it was approximately Rs. 30 on average over the year and across the country. The cost of preparing a non-vegetarian thali in that year was reported as Rs. 58. We use both these figures in separate estimates, but have the following comments to make before presenting them.

First, there is no standard definition of what a thali should contain. We find Crisil’s conception of a vegetarian thali to be quite close to a recognised vegetarian meal across the country. The non-vegetarian thali is more difficult to identify precisely as its contents tend to vary substantially across regions. Next, though Crisil’s definition of a vegetarian thali is quite apt, the estimated cost is for a “home-cooked” thali. However, not all workers are able to eat home-cooked food for all their meals each day. This is particularly relevant in the context of long-distance migrants in search of employment, who are increasingly part of the economic landscape in India today. In our informal enquiries, the figure for a vegetarian thali eaten in a commercial outlet quoted to us was higher than Rs. 30 in Rajasthan, Bihar, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu. Therefore, Rs. 30 is likely to be an underestimate. So would Rs. 58 be the case for a non-vegetarian thali. Despite these reservations, we base our estimates of the cost of a thali as stated by Crisil, as these are from a source external to our study.

The standard of living in terms of food

The value of food consumption used by us to measure the standard of living includes the imputed value of free supplies from the public distribution system (PDS), “cooked food received free in workplace” and “cooked food received as assistance”. While HCES 2024 reports the average value of food consumption it does not report the value of consumption (MPCE) with imputation across the population. As we are interested in this distribution when assessing the standard of living, we have computed the value of consumption for each fractile. We have done so according to the method adopted in HCES 2024, using data on the quantities and unit values of various items of food received for free, as posted on the website of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI). As a check on our estimates of the value of food consumption with imputation, we have compared the all-India average MPCE, with imputation implicit in our estimates across fractiles, with the figure published in HCES 2024. We found it to differ by less than that 4%, with our estimate being higher.

Taking into account free rations when evaluating consumption possibilities assumes relevance , given the announcement by the Government of India that free rations will be extended to 80 crore (800 million) people – over 50% of the population – for five years from January 2024. Our estimates of the number of thali meals per day that could be consumed per person given their expenditure on food across fractiles of the population are presented, separately for rural and urban India, in Tables 1 and 2.

**Table 1. The thali index of consumption, rural India**

Fractiles	Monthly per capita expenditure on food with imputation (Rs.)	Daily per capita expenditure on food with imputation (Rs.)	Number of vegetarian thalis commanded	Number of non-vegetarian thalis commanded
0-5%	1,060.36	35.35	1.18	0.61
5-10%	1,281.15	42.71	1.42	0.74
10-20%	1,444.16	48.14	1.60	0.83
20-30%	1,609.46	53.65	1.79	0.92
30-40%	1,755.13	58.50	1.95	1.01
40-50%	1,901.74	63.39	2.11	1.09
50-60%	2,043.02	68.10	2.27	1.17
60-70%	2,217.40	73.91	2.46	1.27
70-80%	2,428.58	80.95	2.70	1.40
80-90%	2,735.59	91.19	3.04	1.57
90-95%	3,101.35	103.38	3.45	1.78
95-100%	3,876.47	129.22	4.31	2.23

Source: Computed using Table A10F of HCES 2024 and data from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (accessed on 6 May 2025).

Our estimate of the real value of food consumption across fractiles serves as a guide to the standard of living. In rural India, 40% of the population cannot afford two vegetarian thalis a day and 80% cannot afford the combination of one vegetarian and one non-vegetarian thali, at a total cost of Rs. 88. In urban India, 10% of the population cannot afford two vegetarian thalis a day and 50% cannot afford the combination of one vegetarian and one non-vegetarian thali a day. Food deprivation in rural India is more widespread than it is recognised.

Table 2. The thali index of consumption, urban India

Fractiles	Monthly per capita expenditure on food with imputation (Rs.)	Daily per capita expenditure on food with imputation (Rs.)	Number of vegetarian thalis commanded	Number of non-vegetarian thalis commanded
0-5%	1,344.51	44.82	1.49	0.77
5-10%	1,656.75	55.22	1.84	0.95
10-20%	1,895.55	63.19	2.11	1.09
20-30%	2,145.90	71.53	2.38	1.23
30-40%	2,350.31	78.34	2.61	1.35
40-50%	2,572.20	85.74	2.86	1.48
50-60%	2,775.92	92.53	3.08	1.60
60-70%	3,061.41	102.05	3.40	1.76
70-80%	3,370.61	112.35	3.75	1.94
80-90%	3,873.95	129.13	4.30	2.23
90-95%	4,475.68	149.19	4.97	2.57
95-100%	5,984.70	199.49	6.65	3.44

Source: Computed using Table A10F of HCES 2023-24 and data from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (accessed on 6 May 2025).

Do recent poverty estimates for India adequately reflect the standard of living?

The thali index provides perspective on some estimates of poverty in India that have followed the publication of the HCES 2024. Among them, the one from the SBI shows poverty to be less than 5% in both rural and urban India. A thali index of the standard of living, on the other hand, points to higher levels of food deprivation. This dichotomy exists because poverty studies tend to assume that households or individuals are free to spend all their income on food. This assumption is most likely inaccurate, as some items of expenditure – such as health, education, transportation and clothing – assume a priority, as they are needed to engage in economic activity. The need to spend on these items exerts a squeeze on food expenditure, which, along with the price of food, determines actual consumption possibilities. Now, households would have to eat less in order to earn an income. So, starting out with the data on the expenditure on food and translating it into a measure of feasible food consumption is, in our view, realistic. The relevance of such an approach may be understood by noting that the estimates of poverty in the SBI report are based on an update of the Tendulkar poverty line for 2011-12. Applying the subsequent inflation rate, the report arrives at monthly poverty lines of Rs. 1,632 for rural areas and Rs. 1,944 for urban areas in 2023-24. We can see from Tables 1 and 2, that these expenditure levels do not translate to two vegetarian thalis per person daily for up to 40% of the rural population and for 20-30% of the urban population, even when it is assumed that the expenditure is entirely on food. A second set of poverty estimates, using data from the HCES 2023, was published by the World Bank in April 2025. They are even more optimistic than those of the SBI, pegging “extreme poverty” at 2.8% for rural India and 1.1% for urban India). We leave it to readers to compare these poverty estimates with estimates of the standard of living in India in 2023-24 using the thali index.

Salience of the price of food

Our findings using a thali index of the standard of living suggest that there is a case for reviewing how poverty is measured in India. For a start, we would argue for a poverty measure that includes at least two thali meals a day. Here we would like to highlight an implication of the emerging practice of viewing poverty as multidimensional. While this is both useful and an improvement over the focus hitherto on income poverty, lower recorded poverty based on an index that comprises up to twelve indicators of deprivation (NITI Aayog, 2024) can mask a persisting food deprivation, which in our view must remain at the core of appraising the standard of living, and thus poverty. The estimates presented here indicate that the levels of poverty measured in terms of food deprivation in India are likely higher than those based on the extant approach to the measurement of income poverty. The unit price of food used to arrive at the command over food is central to this exercise. Our study points to the salience of the price of food for the standard of living in India, a factor which receives far too little attention from policymakers but remains crucial to the solution to the problem of poverty in India.

Addendum: Since the publication of our piece on June 6, the Editor has drawn our attention to the I4I post ‘Determining how many Indians are poor today’ by Maitreesh Ghatak and Rishabh Kumar (May 2024), which used the price of a basic meal to draw an inference about the level of poverty implied by the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey of 2022-23. We were unaware of this work at the time of writing, and thank the Editor for the reference. Strictly speaking, ours is a measure of the standard of consumption in India based on the price of a thali meal. That by Ghatak and Kumar is in the mould of a poverty study, in that it constructs a poverty line and points out its implication for the number of poor. However, both signal the plausibility of poverty in India being higher than the estimates that have been offered after the appearance of HCES 2024 in some prominent and publicised studies which are reviewed here

The authors thank Aditya Bhattacharjea, Mahendra Dev, Udaya Shankar Mishra, PC Mohanan, M Parameswaran, Indira Rajaraman, Rishi Vyas for helpful advice. Errors, if any, would be the authors’ own.

Note:

With thali denoting a plate, a thali meal is a complete unit of food consumption comprising rice/roti (Indian bread), daal (lentils) and vegetables or meat/fish.