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UNDP India/Dhiraj Singh
135 Million Indians Exited “Multidimensional

135 Million Indians Exited “Multidimensional" Poverty as per Government Figures. Is that the same as Poverty Reduction?

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published Published on Aug 7, 2023   modified Modified on Aug 7, 2023

The Niti Aayog recently released its National Multidimensional Poverty Index 2023, according to which the poverty headcount ratio declined from 24.85 percent in 2015-16 to 14.96 percent in 2019-21. In absolute numbers this translates to 135 million people exiting multidimensional poverty in this time period. In addition, a few days earlier, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released its own Multidimensional Poverty Index, which in a press note said that, “India saw a remarkable reduction in poverty, with 415 million people exiting poverty within a span of just 15 years (2005-06 to 2019-21)”.

Both sets of numbers were taken as a “remarkable” achievement by many mainstream media outlets as a sign that India has made steady progress in bringing its people out of poverty, for instance here, here and here.

Source: National Multidimensional Poverty Index 2023, Niti Aayog

 

But is bringing people out of multidimensional poverty the same as brining people out of poverty? Is the statement “135 million people exited multidimensional poverty” the same as the statement “135 million people exited poverty”? 

Not quite. And this is where things get interesting and tricky.

Poverty is broadly defined as a state where an individual or family lacks the monetary resources to sustain a minimum standard of living. The most widely accepted approach is to work out a minimum expenditure or income required to purchase a basket of goods and services that satisfies basic human requirements. This minimum expenditure is called the poverty line and people who are unable to meet this norm are deemed to be below the poverty line (BPL). 

India has undertaken periodic assessments of poverty since the 1960s. The different approaches were as follows:

1.    Working group for poverty estimation (1962): The poverty line in India was quantified for the first time in 1962 in terms of a minimum food and non-food requirement for individuals for a healthy life. Separate poverty lines for rural and urban areas were calculated at Rs 20 and Rs. 25 per capita, per month respectively in 1960-61 prices. The expenditure excluded spending on health and education, both of which were assumed to be provided by the State. 

2.    Dandekar and Rath (1971): The landmark study by the two economists first established a consumption level required to meet a minimum calorific norm, which was pegged at 2,250 calories per capita, per day. Their departure from previous studies was to calculate a poverty line based on expenditure to meet this minimum calorific norm, which was Rs. 15 per capita, per month for rural households and Rs. 22.5 per capita per month for urban households at 196061 prices. 

3.    Y.K. Alagh Taskforce (1979): The poverty line was defined in terms of per capita consumption expenditure level and fixed at 2,400 kcal per capita, per day in rural areas and 2,100 kcal per capita, per day in urban areas, which translated to a rural and urban poverty line expenditure of Rs. 49.09 and Rs. 56.64 per capita, per month respectively at 1973-74 prices. 

4.    Tendulkar Committee (2009): The Tendulkar Committee suggested several changes to the way poverty was measured. Firstly, it recommended a shift away calorie norms used in all poverty estimations since 1979 and towards target nutritional outcomes. Secondly, it recommended a uniform all-India poverty line basket across rural and urban India. It recommended incorporation of private expenditure on health and education while estimating poverty. Instead of monthly household consumption, expenditure was broken up into per person per day consumption, resulting in the figure of Rs 32 and Rs 26 a day for urban and rural areas. The national poverty line for 2011-12 was estimated at Rs. 816 per capita per month for rural areas and Rs. 1,000 per capita per month for urban areas.

As can be gauged from the above estimates, Poverty measurement in India has traditionally been based on consumption expenditure, and not income. As per a paper on poverty measurement by the Rural Development Ministry, this is because of the difficulties in assessing incomes of self-employed people, daily wage laborer and the rural poor, seasonal fluctuations in income and other factors. Hence consumption expenditure was thought be a more reliable figure for calculating poverty. 

Consumption expenditure was derived from the household consumer expenditure surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) on a quinquennial (5-year) basis. The erstwhile Planning Commission released the estimates of poverty as number of persons below poverty line as a percentage of Indian population for the years 1973-74, 1977-78, 1983, 1987-88, 1993-94, 1999-2000, 2004-05, 2009-10 and 2011-12 respectively. In July 2013 the Planning Commission released poverty data for 2011-12 based on the Tendulkar poverty line. The number of poor was pegged at 269.8 million or 21.9% of the population. 

After this, no poverty estimates based on consumption expenditure have been released. The next thick NSSO survey on household consumption expenditure (the 75th round in 2017-18) was conducted, but the data was not released by the government. In a press release in 2019 the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation said that it had decided not to release the survey results “in view of the data quality issues”. The press note added that the results of the survey diverged from the levels of consumption patterns when compared to government data on the actual production of goods and services. 

India has not released poverty numbers based on consumption expenditure since 2011-12, and this is why using the numbers of the poor exiting multidimensional poverty as a proxy for estimating poverty based on consumption expenditure is like comparing apples and oranges.

So what exactly is Multidimensional poverty and how is it similar or different the regular poverty gauge? 

The NITI Aayog report in its foreword, penned by a senior adviser Dr. Yogesh Suri, concedes that poverty estimation relied solely on income or monetary measures, and a new approach evolved to incorporate multiple dimensions and non-income factors. The NITI Aayog released its first Multidimensional Poverty Index for India (MPI) in 2021 based on the National Family Health Survey 4 (NFHS 4)

However, he writes that, “It serves as a valuable complement to monetary poverty statistics”. 

What is the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index?

The UNDP’s global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) is a key international resource that measures acute multidimensional poverty across more than 100 developing countries. It was first launched in 2010 and advances SDG 1—ending poverty in all its forms everywhere— and measures interconnected deprivations across indicators related to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The global MPI begins by constructing a deprivation profile for each household and person in it that tracks deprivations in 10 indicators spanning health, education and standard of living. 

Source: Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, UNDP 

For example, a household and all people living in it are deprived if any child is stunted or any child or adult for whom data are available is underweight; if any child died in the past five years; if any school-aged child is not attending school up to the age at which he or she would complete class 8 or no household member has completed six years of schooling; or if the household lacks access to electricity, an improved source of drinking water within a 30 minute walk round trip, an improved sanitation facility that is not shared, nonsolid cooking fuel, durable housing materials, and basic assets such as a radio, animal cart, phone, television, computer, refrigerator, bicycle or motorcycle. All indicators are equally weighted within each dimension. The health and education indicators are weighted 1/6 each, and the standard of living indicators are weighted 1/18 each. A person’s deprivation score is the sum of the weighted deprivations she or he experiences. The global MPI identifies people as multidimensionally poor if their deprivation score is 1/3 or higher.

By contrast, the MPI constructed by the NITI Aayog retains the ten indicators of the UNDP index, and adds two of its own: Maternal Health and Bank Accounts “in line with national priorities”. An individual is considered MPI poor if their deprivation score equals or exceeds the poverty cutoff of 33.33 percent. 

Source: National Multidimensional Poverty Index 2023, Niti Aayog

The NITI Aayog’s 2023 MPI provides multidimensional poverty estimates for India’s 36 States & Union Territories, along with 707 administrative districts across 12 indicators of the national MPI. These estimates have been computed using data from the 5th round of the NFHS (NFHS-5) conducted in 2019-21. According to the report, the poverty headcount ratio declined from 24.85 percent in 2015-16 (based on NFHS-4) to 14.96 percent (2019-21, NFHS-5), which translates to 135 million (13.5 crore) people exiting multidimensional poverty in this period. 

So is poverty in India actually going down?

This is where many economists have struck a note of caution. Prabhat Patnaik for one, writes that the UNDP’s concept of poverty is vastly different from what is usually meant by the term. Patnaik explains that the nation’s official poverty estimates, “though no longer directly based on nutritional deprivation, still take nutrition as a point of departure; and the NSS (National Sample Survey) large sample consumer expenditure surveys provide the statistical basis for these estimates”. Patnaik notes that any society undergoing modernization should show an improvement in the indices that comprise the MPI. However, “the satisfaction of all these criteria, however, is perfectly compatible with the family’s real income shrinking, in the sense of commanding a smaller and smaller bundle of goods”.  

The rationale for taking nutrition as the basic criterion for estimating poverty is that nutritional deprivation is the litmus test that shows up overall immiserisation. Nutritional intake is a proxy for real income, and worsening nutritional intake (except at the top where such intake is deliberately reduced for health reasons to avoid “over-consumption”), is a fairly reliable symptom of the family becoming worse off. Patnaik writes that, the 75th Round of the NSS in 2017-18, by contrast, pointed out that in rural India between 2011-12 and 2017-18, the per capita real spending on all goods and services, fell by 9%, “a finding so startling that the Central government withdrew the data from the public domain mere hours after releasing it”.

The implication is that the NSS consumption surveys are pointing to a decrease in real income, which means people cannot afford the same amount of food as they did before, while Multidimensional poverty is constructed in a way that excludes this measure, and therefore shows that poverty is declining. 
     
References
National Multidimensional Poverty Index 2023, July, 2023, Niti Aayog, https://niti.gov.in/sites/default/files/2023-07/National-M
ultidimentional-Poverty-Index-2023-Final-17th-July.pdf
 
Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2023, July, 2023, UNDP, https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/2023-07
/2023mpireportenpdf.pdf

25 Countries Halved Multidimensional Poverty Within 15 Years, but 1.1 Billion Remain Poor, Press Release, United Nations Development Programme, July, 2023, https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/2023-0
7/2023%20MPI%20press%20release_EN.pdf

Remarkable Reduction, says UNDP as 415 Million Indians exit Poverty, ABP News, 11 July, 2023, https://news.abplive.com/news/remarkable-reduction-united
-nations-development-programme-as-415-million-indians-exit
-poverty-1615111

In 15 years, 415 million people came out of poverty in India, Firstpost, 11 July, 2023, https://www.firstpost.com/world/in-15-years-415-million-p
eople-came-out-of-poverty-in-india-12852902.html

135 million fewer multidimensional poor in 2021 compared to 2015: NITI Aayog index, Hindustan Times, https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/indias-multidime
nsional-poverty-decreases-lifting-135-million-out-of-pover
ty-niti-aayog-report-101689621336976.html

Poverty Measurement in India: A Status Update, Dr. Seema Gaur, Dr. N. Srinivasa Rao, Working Paper No. 1/2020, Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India, https://rural.nic.in/sites/default/files/WorkingPaper_Pove
rty_DoRD_Sept_2020.pdf

Press note on Household Consumer Expenditure Survey, Press Information Bureau, Government of India November, 2019, https://pib.gov.in/Pressreleaseshare.aspx?PRID=1591792
National Family Health Survey 4, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India, 2015-16, https://im4change.org/docs/311Report-of-National-Family-H
ealth-Survey-4-released-in-December-2017.pdf

UN Poverty Estimates for India: A Simply False Euphoria, Prabhat Patnaik, July, 2023, Newsclick, https://www.newsclick.in/un-poverty-estimates-i
ndia-simply-false-euphoria

Photo Credit: UNDP India/Dhiraj Singh


Common Cause, 7 August, 2023


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