Since Independence, an era marked largely by limited income and growth, the Government of India has been pursuing its policies for economic welfare with reference to a nutrition-based subsistence norm. The concept and method of estimating poverty has come in for criticism in recent years in the context of (i) economic policy reforms based on targeted policy interventions; and (ii) the findings on economic growth involving a decline in poverty along with an increase in calorie deprivation. The debate seems to have overlooked issues concerned with both method and norm. This study therefore examines the following questions: What is the status of real consumer expenditures of the poorer decile groups during the past three decades? What do estimates of cereal quantities consumed for different population groups suggest? How far they tally with such estimates for the total population? What have been the temporal changes in calorie intake across different decile groups? How valid are the exogenous norms for threshold levels of calorie intake worked out in the 1960s and 1970s since when the economy has experienced structural and technological changes and improvements? How far the selfperception of the population with reference to adequacy of food consumption corroborates such findings? How far these measures and interpretations are validated by estimates of final health outcome parameters? Per capita calorie intake in general has declined for the richer sections and increased for the poorer ones, though not sufficiently, in both rural and urban India. Similar profiles are found across states with differences in income percentiles at which they converge. Reductions in calorie intake have taken place almost on a sustained basis for the majority, the higher decile groups in particular, for the past three decades. This should have spelt a worsening health disaster, which has not happened. State wise profiles on calorie intake and deprivation reveal little co-variation with related health outcome parameters. This might be because of either compensating changes in diets and related health parameters, which calls for serious academic attention or irrelevance of energy as the major determinant of physical capability and health. It is difficult on the basis of available information and knowledge to explain the observed relationship among income/consumption, calorie intake and health outcomes. In other words, calorie norm may no longer be relevant today for defining the minimum subsistence. Hence, one could explore alternative options for distributional outcome evaluation. With the country transforming itself into one of the fastest growing economies in the world, it is important to set sights high for not only sustaining the growth process but also make it broad based and inclusive as visualized in the Eleventh Five Year Plan. Such improvements may be measured in terms of a robust order-based average like the median. Inclusion (participation) of the relatively deprived in such a growth process may be defined with reference to the order-based average of the outcome measure, that is, assess their economic status with referenc