India reduces its ‘poor’ population to half, lifts 271 million out of poverty in 10 years: Report

Stamping on India’s efforts towards poverty alleviation, the United Nations Development Programme’s ‘Multidimensional Poverty’ Index suggests that the South Asian nation has made the fastest reductions in the number of people living below the poverty line since 2005-06.

“This progress was largely driven by South Asia. In India, there were 271 million fewer people in poverty in 2016 than in 2006, while in Bangladesh the number dropped by 19 million between 2004 and 2014”, the report reads.

The UN data suggests that ‘multidimensional poverty’ in India almost halved between 2005-06 to 2016-17 i.e. went down to 27.9 percent from 55.1 percent. It fairly translates into 271 million in a period of ten odd years. India, as per report, has significantly improved across different indicators such as health, assets, cooking fuel etc.

Along with India, Cambodia reduced its MPI values the fastest. India’s MPI value reduced from 0.283 in 2005-06 to 0.123 in 2015-16.

The report identifies 10 countries, with a combined population of around 2 billion people, to illustrate the level of poverty reduction, and all of them have shown statistically significant progress towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal 1, namely ending poverty “in all its forms, everywhere”.

Among all states in India, Jharkhand topped the chart in countering multidimensional poverty. Other states like Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar and Chhattisgarh too appeared promising in their efforts of reducing poverty. In Jharkhand alone, the multidimensional poverty percentage fell to 46.5 from 74.9. The report indicated that half of India’s population living below poverty line belonged to these four states only.

Recently, India was ranked 95th out of 129 countries in a new index that measures global gender equality looking at aspects such as poverty, health, education, literacy, political representation and equality at the workplace.