It’s official! The number of people living below poverty line in India went down by 415 million between 2005-06 and 2019-21, says a new Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) released on Monday jointly by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford.
However, the index says that India still houses the world’s highest number of poor at 228.9 million, which is followed by Nigeria which has 96.7 million projected in 2020.
The developing region with the largest number of poor people is Sub-Saharan Africa (nearly 579 million), followed by South Asia (385 million), the report says.
Here comes a few points to elaborate on report…
* According to the report, India is the only country in South Asia where female-headed households are poorer than male-headed households.
- Ninety per cent of India’s poor people live in rural areas & 10 per cent in urban areas.
- Bihar continues to be the poorest state in the country. Others among the top 10 poorest states were Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Arunachal Pradesh and Rajasthan.
- West Bengal was the only state among the top-10 poorest in India in 2015-16, and not in 2019-21.
- About 18.7 per cent of people in India were found to be vulnerable to poverty as their deprivation score ranges from 20 per cent to 33 per cent. A person with a deprivation score of 50 is considered to be poor.
In the recently released Global Hunger Index, India ranked 107th out of 121 countries, with worrying figures in child malnutrition and child stunting.
However, the report also commended India’s performance in lifting the poor out of poverty. In the last 15 years, it lifted over 41.5 crore people out of poverty.