Expenditure Pattern and Consumption Inequality in Rural India: A Disaggregate Analysis for Agricultural Households Mukesh1,*, Ghosh Abhijit2 1Deputy Director, Infrastructure and Project Monitoring Division, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India, New Delhi, India 2Assistant Professor of Economics, A N Sinha Institute of Social Studies, Patna, Bihar, India, abhijitghosh2007@rediffmail.com *Corresponding author e-mail id: mukesh.iss.goi@gmail.com
JEL Classification Codes: E21, D63 Online published on 27 July, 2017. Abstract The contribution of agriculture and allied sector to Gross Domestic Production (GDP) has been decreasing over the year in India. But the reduction of dependency on this sector is not significant enough. Rather, it poses a challenge to the sustainability of the sector. This has strong implication for the households associated with the sector leading to live at subsistence level. It is widely acknowledged that consumption expenditure of agricultural households may be more informative than income in studying inequality. This paper is an attempt to find out the consumption inequality of food, non-food and total monthly per capita expenditure of agricultural households at all India, states and sub-states level in rural area. For this purpose, unit level National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data of 68th round, collected exclusively to get idea on consumption expenditure, has been used. It is found that people spends around 45% of total expenditure on food items in most of the states. Gini Coefficient at the disaggregate level shows that the consumption inequality has been increasing for the higher decile at all India level and most of the rural India. The results re-establish the necessity of shifting away excess population from the agricultural sector. Top Keywords Agriculture, Households, Rural, Consumption, Inequality, Unit Level Data, NSSO. Top |