NITI Aayog B.V.R. Subrahmanyam recently claimed that less than 5% of Indians now live below the poverty line. He made the claim based on the findings of the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES), 2022-23. Mr. Subrahmanyam argued that the average consumption expenditure in the bottom 5% of India’s population, as estimated by the survey, is about the same as the poverty line in India, suggesting that the poverty rate in India is somewhere in the range of 0 to 5%. Has poverty really dropped to 5% in India? Here we discuss the question. Guests: Surjit Bhalla is a former member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council; Jayati Ghosh is a development economist and author of ‘The Making of a Catastrophe: The Disastrous Economic Fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic in India’ Host: Prashanth Perumal