BARE NECESSITIES INDEX

BARE NECESSITIES INDEX

Subject : National Index / Economy

Context : The Survey has underlined the need to focus on reducing variations in the access to bare necessities across states, between rural and urban areas, and between income groups.

Concept :

• The Economic Survey 2020-21 has constructed a Bare Necessities Index at rural, urban & all India level, with 26 indicators on 5 dimensions- sanitation, water, housing,micro-environment, & other facilities.
• The BNI builds on the idea of Thalinomics in the Economic Survey for 2019-20, through which it had sought to examine the access to food in the country.
• The BNI summarises 26 indicators on five dimensions — water, sanitation, housing, micro-environment, and other facilities — and has been created for all states for 2012 and 2018 using NSO data.
• The index classifies areas on three levels of access — high, medium, low — to bare necessities.

Key Findings

• The survey showed that all states have increased access to bare necessities in 2018 in comparison to 2012. The highest access was recorded in states like Punjab, Kerala, Gujarat, Punjab and Haryana and lowes was recorded in Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal and Tripura.
• The inter-state disparities in the access to “the bare necessities” also showed a decline in 2018 in comparison to 2012 across rural & urban areas.
• Further, the annual survey noted that the access to the bare necessities has improved disproportionately more for the poorest households in comparison to the richest households across rural & urban areas.
• Lastly, the survey noted that improved access to “the bare necessities” correlates with improvement in health indicators such as infant mortality and under-5 mortality and improvement in education indicators.

Thalinomics: The Economics of a plate of food in India. It is an attempt to quantify what a common person pays for a Thali across India.