Exploring the Poverty Question

The author argues that the claim by individual governments and by the World Bank that Asia has seen a large reduction in poverty over the last three decades, is a spurious claim. It is the result of a logical mistake; while the original definition of poverty was on the basis of satisfaction or otherwise of specified nutrition norms, later without any discussion this definition was changed and delinked from nutrition, thereby committing the fallacy of equivocation. In practice, for many decades the poor have been improperly counted as those below a steadily declining standard of food consumption. Using data for fifty years from India’s National Sample Survey, she shows that when we apply a constant nutrition standard over time, poverty is seen to have worsened considerably, in particular over the period of neoliberal reforms.

Utsa Patnaik taught economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, from 1973 to 2010. Her main research interests lie in the areas of the agrarian question both in history and at present, colonialism and imperialism, and the origins and current prevalence of poverty. These issues have been explored in over one hundred academic papers and several books, including Peasant Class Differentiation (1987), The Long Transition (1999) and The Republic of Hunger (2008). Her last two books (co-authored with Prabhat Patnaik) are A Theory of Imperialism (2016) and Capital and Imperialism (2021).