Approaches to Measure Poverty:

There has been a lot of research on poverty in the past five decades. Various measures based  on  income  levels, food consumption, expenditure  data and large scale surveys are used to measure the percentage of population  in a country who can be  identified  as poor. People who live below  a  specified minimum level of real income can be characterized as living in absolute poverty. The World Bank uses both food  and  non-food  expenditure  for constructing 'poverty line'. Food  requirements are derived based on nutritional requirements set by the indigence line, while non- food expenditures are set on the basis of a relative measure, namely, the average non- food expenditure of the poorest  40%  of  the  population. The government conducts large-scale sample surveys which are done by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) to collect information on consumption expenditure. The population surveyed is divided into expenditure-based groups to study their calorific consumption.