by Elton Gomes
India managed to reduce its poverty rate by half in the decade from 2005-2006, and nearly 271 million people were lifted out of poverty during this 10-year period, as per a United Nations (UN) report. The 2018 global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and Oxford Poverty and Human Development (OPHI) report, however, said that 1.3 billion people around the world still live in multidimensional poverty.
The level of poverty is staggering, particularly in children, but large scale amount of progress is also being made in tackling it, said Achim Steiner, administrator at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Steiner said, “Multidimensional Poverty Index provides insights that are vital for understanding the many ways in which people experience poverty, and it provides a new perspective on the scale and nature of global poverty while reminding us that eliminating it in all its forms is far from impossible,” as per a report in Times Now.
What the report said about India?
The report noted that in India, a total of 271 million people managed to move out of poverty between 2005/06 and 2015/16. Over the ten-year period, India’s poverty rate has almost halved – after it fell from 55 percent to 28 percent. India is the first country for whom progress over time has been estimated.
On other regions
The estimates from UNDP’s Human Development Index showed that half of all people living in poverty are younger than 18 years old. The new figures reveal that in 104 primarily low and middle-income countries, a total of 662 million children are considered multidimensionally poor.
The report said that in 35 countries, half of all children are poor. The report assessed Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) characteristics to derive its final outcome. The MPI looks beyond income to gain a better understand of how people experience poverty in multiple and simultaneous ways.
The MPI identifies how people are being left behind across three important dimensions of health, education, and living standards. It takes into consideration a lack of things such as clean water, sanitation, adequate nutrition, or primary education.
Those who are deprived in at least of a third of the MPI’s components are classified as multidimensionally poor. The report’s figures for 2018 cover almost three-quarters of the global population.
The report noted that in Sub-Saharan Africa, approximately 560 million people (58 percent of the population) are living in multidimensional poverty, while 342 million people (61 percent of those living in multidimensional poverty) of them are living under severe conditions.
In South Asia, 546 million people (31 percent of the population) are multidimensionally poor, whereas 200 million of them (37 percent) are severely so.
Figures for the other regions were less severe and ranged from 19 percent of people in the Arab States living in multidimensional poverty to two per cent of those living in countries covered by the dataset in Europe and Central Asia.
What can India do to reduce poverty?
According to the Indian Express in 2016, India was home to 26 percent of the global extreme poor. This meant that the world’s ability to end extreme poverty by 2030 depended on the ways in which India made sustained attempts towards reducing poverty. The Indian Express then highlighted some ways for India to reduce poverty.
To reduce poverty, India will have to focus on its rural poor. The Indian Express stated that India should capitalise on the increasing connectivity between rural and urban areas, and it should work on the links between agriculture, industry, and the services sectors. Such connectivity has proven effective in the past and certainly holds promised in the future.
Elton Gomes is a staff writer at Qrius
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