250 million out of poverty: How to read this headline
In a new paper, the Niti Aayog said an estimated 248 million Indians exited ‘multidimensional poverty’ (MDP) in the nine-year period of 2013-14 and 2022-23. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already used the data to suggest a reduction in ‘poverty’ during his tenure. Mint explains how to read it.
No measure of poverty is perfect. Traditionally, it’s measured in monetary terms (e.g. you’re ‘poor’ if you earn or spend below a certain threshold).
India’s adaptation of a global multidimensional poverty index (MPI) tries to assess poverty by looking at 12 aspects of life beyond money—broadly classed under education, health, and living standards. These are seen as valuable, real-life indicators of poverty, making up for some of the flaws of monetary measures. A household is first judged ‘deprived’ separately on each of the 12 indicators, and based on the weightage of each indicator, if you turn out to be ‘deprived’ overall as well, you’re called ‘multidimensionally poor’ (MDP).
Household-level raw data comes from the National Family Health Surveys (NFHS), and Niti Aayog takes it ahead with its MDP calculations. The last three NFHS rounds took place in 2005-06 (NFHS-3), 2015-16 (NFHS-4), and 2019-21 (NFHS-5). Niti Aayog had already updated its numbers to reflect NFHS-5 findings in July 2023, and had estimated that 135 million Indians came out of multidimensional poverty between 2015-16 and 2019-21.
Now, it’s gone one step ahead. The three available data points (2005-06, 2015-16, 2019-21), have been used to derive the same for 2013-14 and 2022-23 to establish the progress made in this nine-year period (i.e. “248 million Indians" out of MDP status).
Read more on livemint.com
