Utsa Patnaik and poverty

Here's how I look at Utsa Patnaik's work.

Every pathbreaking piece of scholarship is controversial. That, however is not a sufficient condition for a work to be good.

To me, the issues in the work is the following:

a) What's the state of poverty in India?
b) What's the effect of neoliberal policies on poverty?

These are questions which are multi-faceted and deserve lots of scrutiny. Not just by economists (who are no gods, and have been shown to be wrong before), but also by the general public.

I think the main failure of Indian media is not just the dismissal of the report, but the failure to generate a serious debate about the policies which affect more than 60% of Indians. Indeed, this point is made by Amartya Sen, in his book, Hunger and Public Action. Indian media/democracy has had a very good record in preventing famines (which is relatively simple), but an abysmal record in preventing endemic hunger, to the point where India is below sub-Saharan Africa in many aspects, like general malnourishment. This has nothing to do with "left" or "right".

While I would be the first to disclaim any knowledge of statistics and economics (I do have a good technical education though), I think Utsa Patnaik's work raises many issues which have not been addressed.

The only issue which has been addressed, rather dismissively, by a wholly inadequate article by Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar, seems to be the headcount ratio, or the number of people below a defined "poverty line".

There're also larger issues. Even noted by this article by Angus Deaton and Jean Dreze, surely one of the most respected economists in India, not only has poverty reduction more or less remained the same in the 90s as in the 80s, inequalities rose sharply. Agricultural growth has reduced to half. Also, infant mortality fall is not too good. Female-male ratio actually fell. These are also aspects of poverty. The picture is not so simple. The only way to clarify these issues is to have a vigorous public and academic debate.

Let me make some comments on the academic debate. Utsa Patnaik's work has largely been ignored by the "Great Indian Poverty Debate", largely carried out in 2001-2 in the pages of Economic and Political Weekly. However, I haven't yet seen a well developed critique addressing her main point of measuring poverty using calorie levels. Indeed, Angus Deaton, in his non-technical introduction to poverty study says (I'm quoting at some length):

...it is clear that the food rhetoric is mostly just that. In particular, even when a national poverty line is set using the calorie method, it is usually updated over time in a way that is inconsistent with the maintenance of the nutritional norm. In countries as widely different as the US and India, the official poverty lines have never been updated so as to preserve the original link with food...

which mirrors Patnaik's criticism. Also:

...if one were really to believe in a fixed calorie standard, the poverty line would have to be revised upward. Such revision is something for which there is typically little political support, in India or in the US...

and -

...But because of the political issues involved in redistribution, lines survive even beyond the time when they can be justified, either by considerations of food, or as some average of what people think a poverty line ought to be. Poverty lines are as much political as scientific constructions.

The gist seems to be that calorie measurements give too high a figure to sustain them politically and nobody knows how to "fix" them.

It seems to me, a calorie level, (let's say if it was low enough), could be useful, provided it was consistent. While Patnaik's figures of 75% poverty are pretty astonishing (using 2400 Cal), they do calculate poverty on the basis of consistent 2200 Cal values, and they do show somewhat similar trends.