Poverty me asurement is an un settled issue, both conceptuall y and methodologicall y. Since poverty is a process as well as an outcome; ma ny come out of it while others ma y be falling into it. The net effect of these two parallel processes is a proportion commonly identified as the ‘head count ratio’, but these ratios hide the fundamental dynamism that characterizes poverty in practice. The most recent poverty reestimates by an expert group has also missed thecrucial dynamism. In a study conducted on 13,000 households which represented the crucial dynamism. In a study conducted on 13,000 households whichrepresented the entire country in1993-94 and again on 2004-05, it was found that in the ten-year period 18.2% rural population moved out of poverty whereas another 22.1 % fell into it over this period. This netincrease of about four percentage points was seen to have a considerable variation across states and regions.