New Delhi: As many as 41.5 crore (415 million) people moved out of poverty in India during the 15-year period between 2005-06 and 2019-21, according to an update to the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) released Tuesday.
The report was originally released in 2022.
Improvement in the poverty index for India has significantly contributed to the decline in poverty in South Asia, the report says, and it is for the first time that it is not the region with the highest number of poor people. While South Asia was found to have 38.5 crore poor people, the number was 57.9 crore for Sub-Saharan Africa.
According to the report, deprivation has declined in India on all indicators, and “the poorest states and groups, including children and people in disadvantaged caste groups, had the fastest absolute progress”.
The global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), shows that the incidence of poverty in India fell from 55.1 percent in 2005-06 to 16.4 percent in 2019-21, resulting in a more than halving of the MPI value.
The report notes that, in 2005-06, around 645 million people in India were living in multidimensional poverty, with this figure falling to approximately 370 million in 2015-16 and 230 million in 2019-21.
The analysis was based on available data. Comprehensive data from after the Covid-19 pandemic was not accessible for nearly all the 110 countries, the report states.
India was one of 19 countries that reduced their MPI value by half in a particular period.
The dimensions that are considered for the report are health (with indicators like nutrition and child mortality), education (with indicators such as years of schooling and school attendance), and living standards (with indicators such as cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, assets).
All indicators are equally weighted within each dimension. The global MPI identifies people as multidimensionally poor if their deprivation score is 1/3 or higher. The global MPI constructs a deprivation profile of each household and person through these indicators. The MPI ranges from 0 to 1, and higher values imply higher poverty.
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What the analysis means
The global MPI is the only counting-based index that assesses overlapping deprivation for over 100 nations and 1,200 subnational regions, providing a critical perspective on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1 — ending global poverty while also incorporating indicators relevant to other SDGs.
The study of trends from 2000 to 2022, focusing on 81 nations, finds that 25 countries successfully cut their worldwide MPI values in half within 15 years, demonstrating that rapid change is possible.
While 17 countries that did so had an incidence of less than 25 percent in the first period, India and Congo had an initial incidence of more than 50 percent.
The report also states that, globally, 19.1 percent or 120 crore of the total 610 crore people in 111 developing nations live in multidimensional poverty where almost half of them are impoverished. South Asia is home to 389 million people, accounting for more than one-third of all poor people.
In 2019-21, 18 percent of the Indian population was still vulnerable to multi-dimensional poverty while 21.9 percent was still living under the national poverty line, the report says.
Pedro Conceição, director of the Human Development Report Office, said: “As we reach the mid-point of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, we can clearly see that there was steady progress in multidimensional poverty reduction before the pandemic.”
However, he added, “the negative impacts of the pandemic in dimensions such as education are significant and can have long-lasting consequences”. “It is imperative that we intensify efforts to comprehend the dimensions most negatively affected, necessitating strengthened data collection and policy efforts to get poverty reduction back on track.”
(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)
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