While crossing the 50 per cent threshold is a marker of sorts, the fact is that this is a long-term trend: As family incomes and expenditures have risen, the proportion spent on food has been coming down. What is more noteworthy are some of the other findings, and the related policy implications.
A new working paper by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister that analyses the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey 2022-23 and compares it to results of the 2011-12 survey has found “striking changes in food consumption patterns over the last ten years.” The most significant finding is that for the “first time in modern India (post-independence) … average household spending on food is less than half the overall monthly spending of households”. In other words, Indian families are allocating less than half of their monthly budget towards food items. The paper calls it “a marker of significant progress”.
This decline has been broad-based — occurring across states and Union Territories as well as both urban and rural areas. Within food items, the share of expenditure on cereals has declined significantly; what’s more, the decline in expenditure on cereals is “more substantial for the bottom 20 per cent of the households” both in rural and urban areas. “In all likelihood, this reflects the effectiveness of the government’s food security policies, which provide free foodgrain to large numbers of beneficiaries across all states of the country, with a particular focus on the vulnerable bottom 20 per cent of households,” the paper says. Arguably, with cereals being provided by the government, households could diversify their diets with increased spending on other items such as milk, eggs and meat. The paper notes that this trend also underscores the improvement in overall infrastructure, transportation, storage etc. that has allowed increased access of such food items to all socio-economic classes across the country.
While crossing the 50 per cent threshold is a marker of sorts, the fact is that this is a long-term trend: As family incomes and expenditures have risen, the proportion spent on food has been coming down. What is more noteworthy are some of the other findings, and the related policy implications. For instance, if diets are getting diversified across India then it may require government policies to further promote diverse crops. This has implications for the debate around Minimum Support Prices (or MSPs), which overwhelmingly target cereal production. Similarly, there’s a “significant increase” in the share of household expenditure on “served and packaged processed food” even as there is “significant decline” in cereals’ average per capita consumption (amount in kg) across the country. These trends, that affect the health outcomes of Indians, need to be studied to improve public health policies.
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First uploaded on: 07-09-2024 at 06:52 IST
