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.
