The Y. K. Alagh Committee was a Task Force constituted by the Planning Commission of India in 1977 to establish a formal methodology for estimating the national Poverty Line. The committee submitted its report in 1979, providing the first official, systematic approach to poverty estimation in the country.
The core mechanism of the Alagh Committee was to define the poverty line based exclusively on the per capita consumption expenditure required to meet a minimum daily calorie requirement. It set this nutritional norm at 2,400 Kcal per capita per day for rural areas and 2,100 Kcal per capita per day for urban areas. This calorie-based approach was monetised using 1973-74 prices, resulting in a monthly per capita expenditure of Rs. 49.09 for rural areas and Rs. 56.64 for urban areas. Subsequent poverty estimates were to be calculated by adjusting this monetary value for inflation.
The Alagh Committee's work is foundational to the history of poverty estimation in India, connecting directly to later expert groups like the Lakdawala Committee (1993), the Tendulkar Committee (2009), and the Rangarajan Committee (2014). The original methodology has since been replaced; the Tendulkar Committee shifted the approach away from the exclusive calorie norm to incorporate expenditure on non-food items like health and education, and recommended a uniform poverty line basket across rural and urban India. The current official methodology for poverty estimation is based on the recommendations of the Tendulkar Committee.