New Delhi: The cost of a recommended diet (CoRD) in India in 2011 (the most recent year for which expenditure and consumption data is available) was Rs 45.1 and Rs 51.3 for women and men, said a report published in the Food Policy journal this month.
According to the authors of the report, Kalyani Raghunathan (an economist at the International Food Policy Research Institute) and others – these numbers were almost 1.6 times the commonly used World Bank poverty line of $1.9 a day in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms.
CoRD increased more than 3.5 times for both men and women between 2001 and 2011. During this period, real earnings increased at a faster pace, especially for men.
The paper highlights a significant fact: freedom from poverty, even food security — the way in which it is defined by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) — do not guarantee nutrition security.
As a result, even while India achieved a reduction in poverty in the 2000s, a majority of its rural population was unable to afford nutritional diets and nutritional poverty was significantly higher in India than what is captured by commonly used poverty measures.
If one were to take the World Bank’s $1.9 per day poverty line in PPP terms only 22.5% of Indians were poor in 2011. This share was 24.8% in rural India.
The share of Indian population considered food insecure by the FAO in 2011-12 was even lower, just 16.3%. The FAO measure essentially looks at calorie adequacy and therefore does not take into account other nutritional requirements.
However, 63.3% of people in rural India could not afford what the paper describes as the Cost of a Recommended Diet (CoRD). This share increases to 76.2% if one were to assume that a third of their spending would go on non-food items.
Estimates of nutritional insecurity cannot be calculated after this period, as India does not have a consumption survey after 2011-12.
“Given the fact that the economy has been in a prolonged slowdown even before the pandemic and rural wage growth has been weak, the situation could have worsened,” Raghunathan said as per a report by Hindustan Times.
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