The objective of this paper is to investigate the inter-state and inter-regional disparities in poverty incidence and levels of living in the rural and urban sectors of India.

In this paper, we propose to analyse regional disparities using a more disaggregated data. It is known that there are significant variations in the agro-climatic conditions within the states. Therefore, a more disaggregated analysis of NSS region-wise indicators would be worth trying. In this paper we investigate whether regional disparities are also present in the incidence of poverty and, in consumption levels of the population. In this paper we look at the disparities across states and also in the rural and urban sectors of states. Next, we consider the regions within a state, and also the rural and urban sectors within each NSS region. Specifically, we concentrate on two sets of variables; average per capita consumption of the households and the poverty measures of the population in the geographical unit of interest.