Who Are The Poor Of India?

Using data to break out India’s multidimensional poverty by occupation

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Ever since I quit the corporate world, the story I have been telling myself is that I want to work on uplifting the poorest.

I am data-man, or so I would like to think. So, it is essential for me to understand the size and depth of this problem of poverty. And how do you even define poverty? Let alone quantify it?

Over the past three years, I believe I have earned a decent understanding of it. This is an attempt at formalizing that understanding.

First, what is poverty?

Believe it or not, this isn’t straightforward. There are four different ways to look at it:

• Absolute Poverty: This draws an income line across the world and everyone under it is poor and everyone above it is not poor. There are different lines, the most popular being the “extreme poverty” line which is $1.90 / day adjusted for purchasing power parity. Which basically means let’s keep things apples to apples, not apples to moons. Pros and cons here and you can think about that all day.
• Relative Poverty: This arranges people within a certain population according to income, and those that fall in the bottom tranche are considered poor. A good way of…