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This paper assesses deprivation in India employing a measure proposed by Sitaramam and using consumption data at the household level. As cereals constitute a staple food and form a major portion of expenditure on food, the deprivation measure considered here is deprivation in cereal consumption. The total expenditure at which the Engel curve for cereals turns from concave to convex is taken as the cutoff to determine the deprived households. It is shown that cereal deprivation at the all-India level exhibits a declining trend over the period 1987-88 and 1999-2000, in the rural sector, while there is little change in the urban sector. Further, this decline in cereal deprivation seems to have been slowing down during the reform period. The estimates of deprivation are poorly correlated with the HCI and PGI at state level, both in rural and urban sectors. They, however, have better temporal correlations with those poverty measures. We offer some explanation for these observed differences in alternate deprivation indices. The trends in cereal deprivation are accompanied in some cases by a decline, in real terms, in maximum cereal consumption of each group of consumers. Whether this is an improvement or otherwise of the living standards of the poor, must await further analysis of per capita food consumption in general, with an analysis of prices and quantities of various food items. It is hoped that this kind of study on deprivation of essential commodities may increase our understanding of poverty, and even suggest direct intervention strategies.

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In a recent work (Chattopadhyay, A. K. et al, Europhys. Lett. 91, 58003, 2010), based on food consumption statistics, we showed how a stochastic agent based model could represent the time variation of the income distribution statistics in a developing economy, thereby leading to the definition of an alternative and more preferable "poverty index" (PI) that compared favorably with the actual poverty gap (PG) index data. The new poverty index was defined based on two variables, the probability density function (PDF) of the income statistics and the consumption deprivation (CD) function, a mathematical function representing the shortfall in the minimum consumption needed for survival. This starting model used an agent-based interaction mechanism for asset transactions to generate the time-dependent income distribution, while leaving unexplained how the minimum consumption needed for survival is determined in a time dependent manner. The time dependence of the CD function was introduced there through data extrapolation only and not through endogenous generation of a time dependent series. The present article overcomes these limitations and arrives at a new probabilistic paradigm of poverty modeling. A new unified theoretical structure has been developed that treats all economic agents as interacting agents engaged in the trade of goods and services leading to time varying consumption and income distributions. Here the minimum threshold of income is defined by consumption deprivation (CD) where commodity trade would not take place beyond the basic necessities. Our results reveal that the nature of time variation of the CD function leads to a downward trend in the threshold level of consumption of basic necessities, suggesting a possible dietary transition in terms of lower saturation level of food-grain consumption required for survival. This study reinforces and strengthens our benchmark original study on poverty analysis based on Engel curves and consumption deprivation. The poverty index profile presented here, based on a dynamic model of agent-based trading, conforms to recently observed trends more closely than what the conventional measures of poverty (head count index, poverty gap index and squared poverty gap index) have failed to depict.