Which of the following Committees recommended a poverty line based on nutritional requirements exclusively?

The correct answer is A) Alagh Committee (1979, under Y.K. Alagh, set up by the Planning Commission). It fixed the poverty line purely on calorie norms: about 2400 kcal per person per day in rural areas and 2100 kcal in urban areas, converted into a monetary expenditure. Nutritional requirement was the only yardstick.

• B) Lakdawala Committee (1993): Kept calorie norms as the base but added state-specific price adjustments and moved to an expenditure-based line. It was not nutrition-exclusive.
• C) Tendulkar Committee (2009): Dropped the calorie-intake benchmark. It used Mixed Reference Period consumer expenditure and a broader basket covering health and education. This is the basis of the later expenditure-based approach.
• D) Rangarajan Committee (2014): Revisited calorie-based norms but also took non-food expenditure into account, so it was a hybrid. It also set a higher line than Tendulkar.

The core concept is the evolution of poverty measurement in India from calorie-based to expenditure-based methods. For Mains, this links to the debate on poverty estimates, the Socio-Economic and Caste Census, and the rationale for targeting welfare schemes. Note that the government has not officially adopted a single poverty line since the Rangarajan report.

Trap: Candidates often pick Lakdawala or Rangarajan because they also mention calorie norms. Only Alagh relied on nutrition alone.