Mint Explainer: What are Niti Aayog’s ‘dimensions’ of poverty?
poverty line while lagging behind on other basic necessities. The UN makes reference to this in its sustainable development goals, saying it aims to halve the share of people living in poverty “in all its dimensions" by 2030. The multidimensional poverty index (MPI) measures indicators across education, health and living standards.
The UN Development Programme’s (UNDP) annual global MPI was introduced in 2010. Niti Aayog came out with an Indian version in 2021 with a slightly different methodology, meaning the two cannot be compared. A quarter of Indians were multidimensionally poor (MDP) in 2015-16, a number that fell to 15% in 2019-21, the Niti Aayog’s update showed.
Bihar saw the biggest decline (51.9% to 33.8%), followed by Madhya Pradesh (36.6% to 20.6%) and Uttar Pradesh (37.7% to 22.9%). The southern states were already doing well, so their declines were tiny. Kerala had the lowest share of MDP persons at 0.55%.
The number of MDP Indians fell by an estimated 135 million — a 10-percentage-point drop over five years applied to the 2021 population projection. Note that the global MPI estimated India's MDP share at 27.7% in 2015-16 and 16.4% in 2019-21. Not at all.
The national MPI and the global MPI for India use data from the NFHS, which last took place between June 2019 and April 2021. By February 2020, fieldwork was already complete in 22 of the 36 states and Union territories, including some of the most populated states. So the MPI doesn’t reflect any post-pandemic trends.
For each household surveyed in the NFHS, Niti Aayog checks if it is ‘deprived’ across 12 criteria, 10 of which are drawn from the global MPI. For instance, a family is nutrition-deprived even if one member is undernourished. Each criterion is
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