Should Poverty be Anchored to the National Accounts?

If one replaces average consumption from India's National Sample Surveys with private consumption per capita from the National Accounts, while retaining the survey-based distributions, then one finds a faster rate of poverty reduction in the 1990s. However, the case made for this method of measuring poverty is questionable on many counts. There do appear to be problems in the poverty data for India in the 1990s, but this step is unlikely to solve them.