New Delhi: Yet another international organisation has stated that poverty in India had been reducing steadily until the pandemic, with a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report estimating that 41.5 crore people in the country were lifted out of poverty between 2005-06 and 2019-20, 14 crore of which were since 2015-16.
This comes close on the heels of a World Bank report released earlier this month which said poverty in India had reduced to 10 per cent by 2019-20.
These organisations have, however, been unable to accurately estimate the pandemic’s impact on poverty in India owing to a paucity of data, dampening any possible jubilation among policymakers struggling to revive the economy after the disruptions.
The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2022 report, jointly brought out by the UNDP’s Human Development Report Office and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), covers 111 developing countries and shows that India’s progress not only outranks countries worldwide, but also contributed to the decline in overall poverty in South Asia.
“The reduction in Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) value in India was swift across the two most recent periods,” the report said. “MPI estimates based on the recently released 2019-2021 Demographic and Health Survey for the country show that 415 million people exited poverty between 2005-2006 and 2019/2021— including about 140 million since 2015-2016 — and that the country’s MPI value and incidence of poverty were both more than halved,” the report added.
The Multidimensional Poverty Index looks at poverty in a holistic manner, rather than as a simple outcome of income levels. The MPI thus measures a person’s deprivations across 10 indicators in three dimensions — health, education, and standard of living. All the sections are equally weighted. The health indicator looks at nutrition and child mortality. The education indicator seeks to measure years of schooling and school attendance, while the standard of living indicator measures access to drinking water, sanitation, cooking gas, electricity, housing, and assets.
“The 2019-2021 data show that about 16.4 per cent of India’s population live in poverty, with an average intensity (the average deprivation score among people living in multidimensional poverty) of 42.0 per cent,” the report said.
It added: “About 4.2 per cent of the population live in severe poverty (meaning their deprivation score is 50 per cent or higher). About 18.7 per cent of people, roughly the same proportion as in 2015-2016, are vulnerable to poverty because their deprivation score ranges from 20 per cent to 33 per cent.”
The report also shows that the different governments over the last 15 years have performed about the same in the reduction of multidimensional poverty. The data shows that roughly 27.5 crore people exited multidimensional poverty between 2005-6 and 2015-16, which works out to 2.75 crore people a year, on average. Between 2015-16 and 2019-20, 14 crore people were lifted from multidimensional poverty, which works out to an average of 2.8 crore people a year.
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Children still the poorest
Despite the reduction in poverty of the years, the report however also pointed to a few worrying aspects related to poverty in India.
“Two-thirds of these people (those vulnerable to poverty) live in a household in which at least one person is deprived in nutrition—a worrying statistic,” the report noted. “Based on 2020 population data for India, it has by far the largest number of poor people worldwide (228.9 million), followed by Nigeria (96.7 million projected in 2020).”
The report noted that children are still the poorest age group, with more than one in five (21.8 per cent) children being poor, compared to around one in seven adults (13.9 per cent). This, the report said, translates to 9.7 crore poor children.
The report also said that the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on poverty in India could not be fully assessed because 71 per cent of the data from the 2019-2021 Demographic and Health Survey for the country were collected before the pandemic.
However, it did note that “despite progress, India’s population remains vulnerable to the mounting effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and to rising food and energy prices”, adding that integrated policies tackling the ongoing nutritional and energy crises should be a priority.
Rural-urban divide
According to the report, there is also a stark rural-urban disparity in the incidence of multidimensional poverty, which indicates the policy priorities for the government.
“The percentage of people who are poor is 21.2 per cent in rural areas compared with 5.5 per cent in urban areas,” said the report. “Rural areas account for nearly 90 per cent of poor people: 205 million of the nearly 229 million poor people live in rural areas — making them a clear priority. Only 23 countries covered have a higher proportion of poor people living in rural areas.”
Notably, and as an indictment of several of the government’s flagship schemes such as the PM Ujjwala Yojana (for LPG connections), PM Awas Yojana (for affordable housing), Poshan Abhiyaan (for holistic nourishment), and Swachh Bharat Mission (sanitation), the report found that, among poor people, the most common deprivations were in cooking fuel, housing, nutrition, and sanitation.
The report also found that India is the only country in South Asia where poverty is significantly more prevalent among female-headed households than among male-headed households.
“About 19.7 per cent of people living in female-headed households live in poverty compared with 15.9 per cent in male-headed households,” the report said. “One in seven households is a female-headed household, so around 39 million poor people live in a household headed by a woman.”
Delving deeper, the report found that the situation of the poorest states in India, while improved, remained the same relative to the rest of the country.
“Across states and union territories the fastest reduction in relative terms was in Goa, followed by Jammu and Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan,” the report said. “In relative terms the poorest states have not caught up. Of the 10 poorest states in 2015-2016, only one (West Bengal) was not among the 10 poorest in 2019/2021. The rest— Bihar, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan — remain among the 10 poorest.”
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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