Around 135 million Indians exited ‘multidimensional poverty’, a measure of deprivation beyond money, between 2015-16 and 2019-21, the Niti Aayog says. The basis of calculation is the National Family Health Survey (NFHS). Mint explains:
Multidimensional poverty? What is it?
Poverty’s traditional measure is monetary — income or consumption. But it’s possible to cross the monetary 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.
What are the Niti Aayog’s findings?
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.
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Doesn’t this show resilience during the pandemic?
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.
How do we judge this multidimensionality?
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 calculating a family’s ‘deprivation score’. So, being undernourished counts for 3.5 times lacking electricity. If the final score is more than 33.3%, i.e, the family is deprived on at least 33.3% of the criteria, all its members are MDP.
What else to keep in mind about the data?
No index is perfect: the selection, definition and weighting can be debated. This is not a measure of poverty—it only complements monetary metrics. Academics K.D. Maiti and Santosh Mehrotra have argued that the MPI puts input, process and outcome indicators in the same bucket. E.g.: electricity can be seen as an ‘input’ towards prosperity, schooling as a ‘process’, and dropping out of school or low BMI as an ‘outcome’. Yet, the index can be an important policy tool since it also provides estimates at the district level.
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