Food poverty looks worse in India than in Pakistan

We at Gallup Pakistan Digital Analytics looked at fruit consumption by wealth tier in both countries, using HIES 2024-25 for Pakistan and NFHS data for India (via Data for India). The pattern is stark. Among the poorest households, 36% of Indian households report eating fruit, compared to 51% in Pakistan. The gap between India’s poorest and richest households is 33 percentage points. In Pakistan, it’s 23. By this measure, food poverty among India’s bottom tier looks meaningfully deeper than Pakistan’s. Also inequality is lower in Pakistan in terms of fruit access.

It’s a striking comparison, and the direction is consistent: in both countries, without exception, richer households eat more fruit than poorer ones. That part of the finding is solid.

A short note: “Poorest” in each country is a relative rank, not a shared standard of living, so part of this gap may reflect real differences in deprivation, and part may reflect how precisely each country’s data identifies “poor” in the first place. We can’t fully separate the two here, but the gap itself could also be telling us something genuinely meaningful about how differently food access and inequality actually work in each country.

Analysis by Gallup Pakistan Digital Analytics.

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Inspiration for this analysis comes from Data For India