What India spends, one person at a time.

Line everyone up by how much they spend, cut the line into twelve classes, and average each class. That is the ladder. It steepens at the top by construction: the last rung averages the whole long tail above it. The two ladders climb apart as they rise: the same rung buys a different life in the village and in the city, and the gap between the blue and the dark line widens with every step.

The pale dots are the earlier round. Where a pale dot sits below its filled twin, that rung's spending rose. At the very top, the pale dots sit higher.

Each row is a social group; the blue dot is its rural average, the dark dot its urban, and the pale dots are the earlier round. The gaps are real, and they are what this survey can honestly measure: gaps in consumption, counted at the doorstep. They are not income gaps: savings, debt and assets sit outside every dot on this page.

And an average is not a destiny. The four distributions overlap heavily; the group a household belongs to says less about its spending than the state it lives in, and the state strip below spreads far wider than any row here.

The survey files each household by how it mainly earns. Villages are published with every type split by farm and non-farm work; towns come in four types. Casual labour, paid by the day, no contract, sits at the bottom of both panels, and that is the steadiest fact in this table.

The type names the earner; the rupee belongs to the household. A casual-labour average carries working members and dependants alike, and "others" is not a residue of the poor: it is households living on pensions, rent or remittances, with no earner to classify.

Each row is a category of spending; the blue dot marks the rural share of the rupee, the dark dot the urban. Where the dark dot sits to the right, the city spends the larger share: schooling, rent, services, processed food. Where the blue dot leads, it is mostly the kitchen: cereals, milk, vegetables, fuel for the stove.

A share is not an amount. The city's smaller food share still buys more food, because it is a slice of a larger rupee. What the shares reveal is priority under constraint: what a budget defends first.

Each row is one category; the dots show how many percentage points its budget share gained or lost between the two survey rounds. The dark dot is rural (blue where the move is half a point or more), the pale dot urban. Read the zero rule as the dividing line: right is a category that grew as a share of spending, left is one that shrank.

The surprise is at the aggregate. Food's share rose in both sectors: – rural, – urban: the wrong direction for Engel's law in a single year of rising incomes. The drivers are visible on the strip: vegetables and processed food climbed, edible oil fell hardest in villages and fuel and light in towns. The oil fall is most likely a price story: cooking oil got cheaper through 2023-24, as the oils-and-fats line in the CPI guide shows. The cereal plate in §06 is the opposite case, a staple that got dearer.

Everything else in this guide is rupees; this plate is weight. A kilogram needs no deflator: it is the same kilogram in both rounds and both Indias. Cereals are the one food the survey publishes by weight, and they are the budget's oldest anchor: bought first, bought everywhere.

The section above showed Engel's law in shares of money. This is the same law in physical units. As budgets grow, the plate does not grow with them: what changes is what sits beside the grain.

Hold this plate next to the one above. The kilograms move left: fewer cereals eaten. The rupees move right: a larger cereal bill. Lines travelling in opposite directions can mean only one thing: the price per kilogram rose. The survey does not publish that price directly; the two plates together derive it.

Every state carries both Indias. The blue dot is its villages, the dark dot its towns, and the line between them is the internal gap each state lives with. States sort by their rural dot: the vertical drift of blue dots is the inequality between states, the length of each connector the inequality within one.

Small states and UTs sit oddly high, a city-state has almost no countryside, a Himalayan state has almost no metro, so read the big populous states against each other, and the outliers as geography.

This is the first bar of the Engel section, drawn thirty-six times. The rule from that section holds across the map: where budgets are tighter, more of the rupee eats, so the states near the bottom of the spending strip above tend to sit near the top of this one.

A share is still not an amount. A state can hold a high row here because food is dear there, not only because budgets are thin: a Himalayan winter prices the plate differently from a delta harvest. Read the rank, then ask why.

A consumption Gini runs lower than an income Gini everywhere, because the rich save: spending is always more equal than earning. And a household survey undercounts the top: the richest households rarely open the door to a surveyor, and their consumption is hardest to record when they do. So read these dots as a floor under inequality, not a ceiling.

What the survey can say honestly is the direction of travel between two rounds built the same way.

Find your state, then read across. Each figure is the average spent per person in a month, so a family of four spends roughly four times as much. Rent is small in villages because most families own their homes; the survey counts rent only where it is paid.

Health spending is lumpy: a few households with a hospital stay that month raise the average for everyone. The average does not say what a typical family spends; it says what the state spends, divided by its people.

Find your state, then read across. Each figure is the average spent per person in a month, so a family of four spends roughly four times as much. Rent in towns includes what tenants pay; owners living in their own homes are not charged an imputed rent here.

Health spending is lumpy: a few households with a hospital stay that month raise the average for everyone. The average does not say what a typical family spends; it says what the state spends, divided by its people.

The headline MPCE counts only what a household paid for. Many households also receive rice or wheat free from the ration shop, and some receive school uniforms, laptops or cycles. The survey puts a value on those and publishes a second figure "with imputation". The gap between the two is a rough measure of how much the state's welfare reaches the plate.

Each row is a state, with a dot for its villages and one for its towns. A Gini of spending runs lower than a Gini of income or wealth, because the poor spend most of what they have and the rich save, so these figures understate inequality. Compare states with each other, not with income Ginis published elsewhere.