According to the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2022, around 415 million people in India climbed out of poverty between 2005-06 and 2019-21, with the incidence of poverty falling from 55 per cent to just over 16 per cent over this period.

Highlights of MDPI

• The pro-poor thrust of the last 15 years seen in terms of rural housing, education, primary health, bank accounts, women’s collectives, tele-connectivity, technology, employment, skills, social assistance and rural roads seems to have contributed to India bringing 415 million persons out of multidimensional poverty over the last 15 years.
• Deprivations in sanitation, cooking fuel and housing fell the most from 2015-16 to 2019-21.

Concerns with the Report

• Despite tremendous gains, the ongoing task of ending poverty for the 228.9 million poor people in 2019-21 is daunting - especially as the number has certainly risen since the data were collected.
• The report doesn’t fully assess the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on poverty in India as 71% of the data from the National Family Health Survey-5 (2019-2021) relied upon for MPI were collected before the pandemic.
• The World Bank study on slipping back into poverty (2022) also alluded to similar challenges.
• While poverty levels have not worsened, levels of under-nutrition are still very high.

Approach for Rural Upliftment

1. Real Decentralization of Power
• The 85 million women in over eight million self-help groups of the Livelihood Mission offer unprecedented social capital, providing opportunities for human development, credit access, enterprise, and sustainable poverty reduction through diversified livelihoods.
• Their working together with the 3.3 million elected leaders of the local government, 43 per cent of whom are also women, will be transformational if funds, functions and functionaries from the 29 sectors assigned to panchayats as per the Eleventh Schedule of the Constitution are transferred to them by State Legislatures.
• The Central Government can make it mandatory that no funds will be released for these 29 sectors to States that do not comply with the Constitutional mandate for decentralized governance.
2. Effective and Better Governance
• To take responsibility for the 29 sectors, local governments will require skill sets that facilitate better governance outcomes at the cutting edge for citizens.
• Human resources, technology as a means, hand-holding and partnerships will all have to be thrust areas for effectiveness.
• Community cadres like the ASHA Community Health Worker and the Community Resource Persons of the Livelihood Mission could be thought of as possible pathways.
3. MGNREGS as a Decentralized Resource
• MGNREGS should be seen as a decentralized resource for poverty reduction, mitigating global warming, and aiding human well-being.
• Studies have established its efficacy in water conservation, basic infrastructure, and income from animal resources through convergence.
• The studies have also identified areas for improvement — timely wage payment, multi-year watershed plan, timely work provision, better wage rates, pro-poor priority in individual works, etc.
• While it is true that MGNREGS has been getting additional financial resources in Supplementary Budgets, reduction at the BE stage could have been avoided.
• MGNREGS is the only programme where women comprise more than 50 per cent of the wage earners even at the national level.
• Some efforts at containing open-ended demand by giving weightage for deprivation to gram panchayats/backward blocks along with governance improvements in them could be a possibility.
• Convergent resources for productive assets in rural areas, along with diversified livelihoods thrust through women’s collectives, is the best way towards a poverty-free India.

Looking ahead

• In such a situation, it is but natural that the government has to assume the role of a welfare state but the focus has to be on job creation.
• Agriculture in particular should be commercialized - the farm laws sought to do so.
• State governments have a big role to play here.
• Manufacturing has to be revived to create meaningful jobs.
• It is only through a co-ordinated and convergent action on education, livelihoods, nutrition, health, employment, and skills that a breakthrough is possible.
• If resources are available to panchayats, the ‘real rural’ can reverse poverty and disease.

The Sustainable Development Goal target 1.2 is for countries to reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women, and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions by 2030. India’s progress shows that this goal is feasible, even at scale.

Additional Info

Multidimensional Poverty Index

• The global MPI constructs a deprivation profile of each household and person through 10 indicators spanning health, education and standard of living.
• All indicators are equally weighted within each dimension.
• It identifies people as multidimensionally poor if their deprivation score is 1/3 or higher.
• It ranges from 0 to 1, and higher values imply higher poverty.
• It is released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford.
• A means to capture the complexity of poverty that considers multiple dimensions of well-being beyond just monetary poverty.
• MPI 2022:
• India has by far the largest number of poor people worldwide at 22.8 crore, followed by Nigeria at 9.6 crore.
• Bihar, the poorest State in 2015/2016, saw the fastest reduction in MPI value in absolute terms.
• In India, Rural areas saw the fastest reduction in the Multidimensional Poverty Index 2022.