The poverty line in India is usually associated with a calorie threshold. This calorie threshold approach suffers from many problems. An alternative revealed preference-based approach has been provided by Jensen and Miller. In the JM approach, the staple calorie share reveals whether a household is calorie deprived. We use this approach to estimate the extent of poverty in India. Though our poverty estimates are very close to the Tendulkar Committee estimates for the urban sector, for the rural sector our estimates are considerably lower. We also fi nd by our method a remarkable rise in urban poverty between 2004-05 and 2007-08.
