What this shows

Food expenditure for 640+ Indian districts, from the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) 2022–23 by MoSPI. The survey sampled over 2.6 lakh households across all states and union territories.

Each district shows either per-capita monthly spend (₹/month) on a food category or item, or that category's share of the total food budget (%).

Data source

HCES 2022–23 is the first major consumption survey from MoSPI since NSS Round 68 (2011–12). The unit-level microdata has per-household expenditure on individual food items, from a stratified multi-stage sample across rural and urban India. See the survey documentation & sampling strategy →

The Δ 2010→23 column uses NSS Round 66 (2009–10), which had a comparable item schedule. Only 17 food items match cleanly across the two rounds, so the change column is limited to those.

Both datasets are from the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), MoSPI, Government of India.

How the data was curated

Unit-level HCES records were aggregated to district-level summaries:

• Item mapping: 186 food items grouped into categories — Cereals, Pulses, Milk & Milk Products, Egg/Fish/Meat, Vegetables, Fruits, Oils & Fats, Sugar, Spices, Beverages, Packaged Processed Food, Served Processed Food, and others.
• Expenditure: Per-capita monthly spend (₹/month) and share of total food budget (%) computed for every item in every district.
• Sector splits: Separate summaries for Overall, Rural, and Urban households.
• Nutrients: Daily per-capita energy (kcal), protein, fat, carbs, fibre, calcium, iron, zinc, folate, vitamin C, and beta-carotene estimated from reported quantities and standard food composition tables.
• Dietary diversity: Shannon index per district — higher values mean more evenly spread food spending.
• Historical change: Percentage-point change in food-budget share between NSS 66 (2009–10) and HCES 2022–23, for the 17 matched items.

Geography

District boundaries come from NFHS-5 (2019–21) shapefiles, simplified for the web. The GeoJSON was filtered to the districts in the HCES data. Post-bifurcation fixes were applied — Leh and Kargil appear under Ladakh, not the pre-2019 J&K boundary.

How to explore

• Click a district to see its full food spending breakdown.
• Pick a category (Cereals, Milk, Egg/Fish/Meat, etc.) from the sidebar to compare across India.
• Search a food item ("rice", "potato", "chicken") to map that item.
• ₹/month ↔ % of Food toggles absolute spend vs. budget share.
• Rural / Urban / Overall splits by household type.
• State View zooms into one state.
• India tab has national averages, with a Δ column for change since 2009–10.

Notes & limitations

• The survey uses MMRP (Modified Mixed Reference Period) — 7-day recall for some items, 30-day for others. All values here are monthly.
• Expenditure is purchase value, not nutritional intake or home-grown consumption.
• Sample sizes vary. Small-sample districts will be noisier. Household counts are in the data.
• Grey districts had too few surveyed households or couldn't be matched to the boundary file.
• PDS items are separate from open-market purchases (e.g. "Rice (PDS)" vs "Rice (other sources)").
• The Δ comparison covers 17 items that could be matched between NSS 66 and HCES 2022–23. No category-level Δ.