The paper is concerned with discussing some of the basic issues in the measurement of poverty. The measurement of poverty can be split into two distinct operations, viz. Identification (who are the poor) and aggregation (how are the poverty characteristics of different people to be combined into an aggregate measure). The nature of the exercise of poverty measurement is examined in section I. Section II is devoted to the identification issue, including the fixation of a " poverty line" section III goes into the aggregation problem. Some concluding remarks are made in the last section.