India, Nov. 14 -- Back in the 1980s when I was a post-graduate student pursuing economics at the Gokhale Institute in Pune, we were perhaps the last of the batch to listen to guest lectures by the late VM Dandekar. Dandekar pioneered the art of measuring poverty in India in 1971, and used 1960-61 official data. His calculations focused on calorie consumption, or rather food consumption, as the primary barometer that defined the poverty line based on variable estimates in urban and rural India. By the time we were listening to his lectures, this was replaced by suggestions from other committees.

The issue is relevant decades later because getting a fix on poverty levels is still a tricky one, and includes varied approaches. Recently, Kera...