Consumer Expenditure Surveys

Since there is no income survey in India, the closest one can come to finding out how much Indian households are earning is through the accepted practice of using consumer expenditure surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO).
According to the most recent such survey in 2011-12, the average monthly expenditure of a person was Rs 1,287 in rural areas and Rs 2,477 in urban areas. For a family of four, that translates to Rs 5,148 in rural areas and Rs 9,908 in urban areas.
These are averages, which hide wide variation across states and even wider variations between poor and rich. At the national level, 60% to 70% of the population survives below these averages. Eight of the country’s 17 big states had incomes below the national average for rural areas and nine of them were below the national average for urban areas. Unsurprisingly, states with very low incomes included Chhattisgarh, Bihar, MP, Odisha and Jharkhand while the top states were Haryana, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. Karnataka was quite high in urban income rankings but lower in rural one while Tamil Nadu was the other way round.
Surprisingly, in Gujarat, a relatively developed state, the average monthly income of Rs 2,472 per person was lower than the national average. For rural areas, Gujarat’s average income was slightly higher than the national average at Rs 1,430. In fact, between 1999-2000 and 2011-12, Gujarat has slid down the rankings because its rural income grew at 14% per year compared to a national average of 15% and its urban income grew at 12% compared to 13% nationally.
According to Census 2011, one of the biggest occupations is agricultural labourers, numbering some 8.6 crore as main workers and another 5.8 crore as marginal workers. Their numbers have increased by about 34% since 2001. The average daily wage for a male unskilled labourer in rural areas was Rs 192, ranging between a high of Rs 493 in Kerala and a low of Rs 129 in Gujarat.