A flourishing intellectual cottage industry has grown in India — and across the planet — around the worthy enterprise of measuring and estimating poverty and hunger. Much of the published reams of this debate, to which economists, nutritionists and public planners tirelessly contribute, would appear strangely remote to a person who lives with and battles hunger. She would recognise little in their involved, sophisticated, bitterly contested and often opaque calculus, assumptions, arguments and conclusions. She would not find adequate acknowledgement of the struggles that dispossessed people the world over wage every single day against want and injustice, to feed, clothe and house themselves and the people they love.