Income and consumption

India's gross national income per capita in 2008 was $1040. Indian official estimates of the extent of poverty have been subject to debate, with concerns being raised about the methodology for the determination of the poverty line. As of 2005, according to World Bank statistics, 75.6% of the population lives on less than $2 a day (PPP), while 41.6% of the population is living below the new international poverty line of $1.25 (PPP) per day. However, data released in 2009 by the Government of India estimates the percentage of the population living below the poverty line to be 37%.

Housing is modest. According to the Times of India, "a majority of Indians have per capita space equivalent to or less than a 10 feet x 10 feet room for their living, sleeping, cooking, washing and toilet needs", and "one in every three urban Indians lives in homes too cramped to exceed even the minimum requirements of a prison cell in the US." The average is 103 sq ft (9.6 m²) per person in rural areas and 117 sq ft (10.9 m²) per person in urban areas.

Around half of Indian children are malnourished. The proportion of underweight children is nearly double that of Sub-Saharan Africa. However, India has not had any major famines since Independence. A 2007 report by the state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) found that 65% of Indians, or 750 million people, lived on less than 20 (US$0.43) per day, with most working in "informal labour sector with no job or social security, living in abject poverty."

Since the early 1950s, successive governments have implemented various schemes, under planning, to alleviate poverty, that have met with partial success. All these programmes have relied upon the strategies of the Food for work programme and National Rural Employment Programme of the 1980s, which attempted to use the unemployed to generate productive assets and build rural infrastructure. In August 2005, the Parliament of India, in response to the perceived failure of economic growth to gene rate employment for the rural poor, passed the Rural Employment Guarantee Bill into law, guaranteeing 100 days of minimum wage employment to every rural household in all the districts of India. The question of whether economic reforms have reduced poverty has fuelled debates without generating clear-cut answers and has also increased political pressure against further economic reforms, especially those involving the downsizing of labour and cutting agricultural subsidies. Recent statistics in 2010 point out that the number of high income households has crossed lower income households.

Income and consumption