Poor no longer? Dimensions of poverty in India
poverty line and still lack other basics — or make some progress on the latter, yet stay below the poverty line. The UN sustainable development goals aim to halve the share of people living in poverty “in all its dimensions" by 2030. Indicators of health, education and living standards are measured by the multidimensional poverty index (MPI).
The UN Development Programme’s (UNDP) annual global MPI came in 2010. Niti Aayog came up with a slightly tweaked Indian version in 2021. A quarter of Indians were multidimensionally poor in 2015-16, which fell to 15% in 2019-21, the report showed.
The decline was the highest in Bihar (51.9% to 33.8%), Madhya Pradesh (36.6% to 20.6%) and Uttar Pradesh (37.7% to 22.9%). The southern states were already doing well, so their decline was tiny. Kerala had the lowest share of MDP persons: 0.55%.
The number of MDP Indians dropped by an estimated 135 million — that’s a 10 percentage point drop over the five years applied to the 2021 population projection. Note that the global MPI has estimated India’s MDP shares at 27.7% for 2015-16 and 16.4% for 2019-21. Not really.
The national MPI, as well as the global MPI for India, used data from the NFHS, which last took place between June 2019 and April 2021. Fieldwork was already complete in 22 of the 36 states and Union territories, including some of the most populated states, by February 2020. So the MPI doesn’t reflect any possible post-pandemic shifts.
For each household surveyed in the NFHS, the Niti Aayog checks if it meets the threshold of being ‘deprived’ on 12 criteria, 10 of which are drawn from the global MPI. For instance, a family is nutrition-deprived if even one member is undernourished. Each criterion is weighted differently in
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