Multi-dimensional Poverty Index 2018

March 27, 2019

The Multi-dimensional Poverty Index 2018 report prepared by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative makes the following observations about India:

India has reduced its poverty rate drastically from 55% to 28% in 10 years, with 271 million people moving out of poverty between 2005-06 and 2015-16.
India still had 364 million poor in 2015-16, the largest for any country, although it is down from 635 million in 2005-06.
Poverty reduction among children, the poorest states, Scheduled Tribes, and Muslims was fastest.
Of the 364 million people who were MPI poor in 2015-16, 156 million (34.6%) were children whereas in 2005-06 there were 292 million poor children in India. This represents a 47% decrease or 136 million fewer children growing up in multidimensional poverty.
Even though poverty among Muslims and STs has been reduced poverty the most over the 10 years, these two groups still had the highest rates of poverty.
80% of ST members were poor in 2005-06 and 50% of them were still poor in 2015-16. While 60% of Muslims were poor in 2005-06, 31% of them were still poor in 2015-16.
Bihar with more than half its population in poverty was the poorest state in 2015-16.
The four poorest states Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh were still home to 196 million MPI poor people, which was over half of all the MPI poor people in India.
Jharkhand had shown the greatest improvement, followed by Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Nagaland.
Kerala, one of the least poor regions in 2006, reduced its MPI by around 92%.

Global Findings

3 billion People live in multidimensional poverty in the 105 developing countries and represents 23%, or nearly a quarter, of the population of these countries, are deprived in at least one-third of overlapping indicators in health, education, and living standards.
Multidimensional poverty particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and these two regions account together for 83% (more than 1.1 billion) of all multidimensionally poor people in the world.
Two-thirds of all multidimensionally poor people live in middle-income countries, with 889 million people in these countries experiencing deprivations in nutrition, schooling, and sanitation.
The level of global child poverty is staggering, with children accounting for virtually half (49.9%) of the world’s poor. Over 665 million children live in multidimensional poverty.
In 35 countries, at least half of all children are MPI poor and in South Sudan and Niger around 93% of all children are MPI poor.

The MPI provides data about “who is poor” and “how they are poor”.

« Previous Post Next Post »