Tracking What India Eats Shows How Unequal it Is

The apparent paradox in the trends in calorie intake in India has been a subject of old debate.

Data from the consumption expenditure surveys (CES) showed a trend of declining per capita calorie consumption over the years, alongside one of increasing overall consumption expenditure and hence declining poverty rates. Given that the initial poverty line in the late 1970s was derived from the minimum expenditure needed to meet a calorie consumption norm, this was also seen to be causing an anomaly in poverty statistics with the official figures underestimating ‘true’ poverty.

While this debate remains relevant (much of which including the work by the prominent participants including Utsa Patnaik, Jean Drèze, Angus Deaton and others are available in the Economic and Political Weekly), with the long gap in data from the consumption expenditure survey there was no recent data to understand what is going with people’s food consumption. After 2011, the next data are only now available from the Household Consumption Expenditure Surveys (HCES) held in 2022-23 and 2023-24. Although there was a survey in 2017-18, this was rejected by the Government of India citing data quality issues. Without going into the debate, let's look at what these latest rounds of survey say about food consumption.

Before getting into the data – two caveats are important. Firstly, as has been pointed out repeatedly by many here on The Wire, the data from the HCES are not comparable with the previous rounds because of changes to the questionnaire (including some modifications to the list of food items) as well as the data collection method which included repeated visits to a household as against a single visit in previous rounds. While some of the changes do contribute to improving data quality, they make these rounds incomparable with earlier surveys – so it is difficult to arrive at any conclusions on trends over a longer period of time.

Second, the calorie and nutrient consumption figures in both the CES and HCES are derived from data on consumption expenditure. Households report different food items they purchased and the price at which they purchased them. Some adjustments are made for food consumed outside the household. But these are only approximates, that too at the household level which are then used to arrive at an average per capita consumption figure. Intra-household differences are not considered nor are the actual nutritional content which also varies on the basis of the cooking style and so on. Ideally, we should have diet and nutrition surveys which tell us about people’s diets. While there used to be some patchy data available from the National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau (NNMB), these have also been stopped since 2012.

Based on the 2022-23 and 2023-24 HCES, the NSS has now released the Nutritional Intake in India report (report no 594). For convenience, all figures here pertain to 2022-23. We see that the average calorie consumption per capita per day in rural areas is 2,233 Kcal and in urban areas it is 2,250 Kcal. The inequality in calorie consumption by consumption expenditure classes is striking. The report shows that the average per capita calorie consumption per day in rural areas is 1,607 Kcal for the bottom 5% of the population compared to 3,116 Kcal for the top 5% – almost double! In urban areas, the inequality is even worse, with the bottom 5% consuming an average of 1,623 Kcal per day compared to 3,478 Kcal per day by the top 5% (based on Monthly Per Capita Expenditure, MPCE classes).

Even when we consider it on a per consumption unit basis (adjusting for gender and age), there is almost a 1,000 Kcal difference between the bottom 20% compared to the top 20%. This reflects also in the figures for the proportion of households that are consuming less than 80% (i.e. <1,860 Kcal) of the norm (2,325 Kcal) per consumer unit per day. While around half the households in the lowest fractile (0-5%) households on an average consume less than 80% of the required norm, it is very low (3% in rural and 1.7% in urban) in the case of the uppermost fractile (95-100%). This is quite a consistent trend with the proportion or households getting adequate calories rising as the fractile class increases (Figure 1).

Similar trends are observed for protein intake as well (Figure 2). While the average protein intake per person per day is reported to be 61.9 grams in rural areas and 63.2 grams in urban areas, the range extends from 42.2 grams and 44.5 grams for the bottom most fractile to 88.5 grams and 94.5 grams for the top most fractile in rural and urban areas respectively.

Along with the inequality in consumption, the quality of the nutrients being consumed is also an issue. The ICMR “My Plate” recommendations suggest that proteins from cereals should be the source for around 31% of the protein consumption whereas about 35% should come from pulses/eggs/chicken/meat and 17% from milk. The rest would come from nuts, seeds, vegetables, fruits and other sources. The NSS consumption data show that for the bottom most group (0-5%), almost 60% of the proteins come from cereals, with only 22% coming from pulses and animal-sources whereas the figures are 35% and 39% respectively for the richest group. Here, again as the MPCE increases, the diversity of protein sources increase.

As mentioned above, dietary surveys would a more appropriate tool to understand food consumption in India. Yet, based on the HCES, two trends are reinforced. There is still a large section of the population that does not meet minimum calorie norms and diet quality is still heavily cereal based. Further analysis of the unit level data can give us insights into time trends (making some adjustments for comparability), affordability and so on. What is also quite obvious is the inequality in something as basic as food consumption. Many have effectively shown that the claim that inequality in India is amongst the lowest across the world is farcical and based on false comparisons. Most other metrics of inequality, like food consumption in this case, also validate the concern that inequality in India is in fact very high.

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