Lakdawala Committee

The Lakdawala Committee — formally the Expert Group on Estimation of Proportion and Number of Poor, chaired by economist D. T. Lakdawala — was constituted by the Planning Commission of India in 1989 and submitted its report in 1993. It revisited the methodology of measuring poverty that had been inherited from the Y. K. Alagh Task Force of 1979, which had first defined the poverty line on the basis of a nutritional norm of 2,400 calories per capita per day in rural areas and 2,100 calories in urban areas. The Lakdawala Committee retained these calorie-based anchors but fundamentally altered the way the poverty line was updated and disaggregated, making its recommendations the official basis for India's poverty estimates from the mid-1990s until the Tendulkar Committee (2009) superseded it.

The Committee's central innovations were threefold. First, it recommended that separate state-specific poverty lines be constructed instead of applying a single all-India line uniformly, recognising that price levels and consumption baskets varied sharply across states. Second, it discontinued the practice of adjusting consumption distribution data to match National Accounts Statistics aggregates, relying instead directly on National Sample Survey (NSS) consumption expenditure data. Third — and most technically significant — it recommended updating poverty lines over time using state-specific price indices: the Consumer Price Index for Agricultural Labourers (CPI-AL) for rural areas and the Consumer Price Index for Industrial Workers (CPI-IW) for urban areas, rather than relying on implicit deflators derived from NSS data. This shifted the temporal updating of the poverty line onto a more transparent and locally sensitive price basis.

The Lakdawala methodology governed official poverty figures through the 1990s and 2000s; estimates such as the headline figure of roughly 36 per cent below the poverty line in 1993–94, falling to about 26 per cent in 1999–2000, flowed from this framework. Its limitations, however, drove successive revisions. Critics noted that it remained tethered to a calorie-anchored line that ignored expenditure on health, education and other essentials, and that the CPI-AL did not fully capture rural cost-of-living changes. These shortcomings prompted the Suresh Tendulkar Committee (2009), which moved away from calorie norms to a broader consumption basket and adopted a uniform mixed-reference-period methodology, followed by the C. Rangarajan Committee (2014). For the 2026 exam aspirant it is essential to place Lakdawala correctly in this lineage: Alagh (1979) → Lakdawala (1993) → Tendulkar (2009) → Rangarajan (2014).

For UPSC and other competitive examinations, the Lakdawala Committee is tested primarily in the Indian Economy segment of General Studies (and in optional economics and sociology papers dealing with poverty and social justice). Typical question angles ask candidates to identify which committee introduced state-specific poverty lines, to match committees with their chairpersons and years, or to distinguish its calorie-anchored approach from the Tendulkar Committee's basket-based approach. Prelims questions often hinge on the use of CPI-AL and CPI-IW for updating the line, while Mains answers benefit from a critical evaluation of how successive committees progressively broadened the conception of poverty beyond mere caloric subsistence.