Fastest poverty reduction - India managed it between 2005 to 20015: UNDP
By TIOL News Service
|
NEW DELHI, JULY 13, 2019: OF the 1.3 billion people who are multidimensionally poor, more than two-thirds of them '886 million' live in middle-income countries. India, a lower-middle income country, experienced the fastest absolute reductions in poverty in the 2019 Multidimensional Poverty Index.
The traditional concept of poverty is outdated, according to a new report released yesterday by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). New data demonstrates more clearly than ever that labeling countries - or even households - as rich and poor is an oversimplification. Of the 10 selected countries for which changes over time were analyzed, India and Cambodia reduced their MPI values the fastest—and they did not leave the poorest groups behind.
As first reported in the 2018 Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), India lifted 271 million people between 2005/06 and 2015/16, with the poorest regions, groups, and children, reducing poverty fastest. India demonstrates the clearest pro-poor pattern at the subnational level: in absolute terms, the poorest regions reduced multidimensional poverty the fastest. Examples include Jharkhand, where the incidence of multidimensional poverty nearly halved, falling from 74.9 percent in 2005/06 to 46.5 percent in 2015/16.
Findings from the 2019 global MPI sheds light on disparities in how people experience poverty, revealing vast inequalities among countries and among the poor themselves.
“To fight poverty, one needs to know where poor people live. They are not evenly spread across a country, not even within a household,” said Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator. “The 2019 global Multidimensional Poverty Index provides the detailed information policy makers need to more effectively target their policies.”
The MPI goes beyond income as the sole indicator for poverty, by exploring the ways in which people experience poverty in their health, education, and standard of living. India is among the countries that significantly reduced deprivation in all 10 indicators. The indicators included nutrition, child mortality, years of schooling, school attendance, cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and assets. India strongly improved assets, cooking fuel, sanitation and nutrition between 2005/06 and 2015/16.
Still, despite the massive gains made in reducing multidimensional poverty, 373 million Indians continue to experience acute deprivations. Additionally, 8.8 percent of the population lives in severe multidimensional poverty and 19.3 percent of the population are vulnerable to multidimensional poverty.
|