The world should learn poverty alleviation from India
This is a lesson for the world that Multidimensional poverty can also be removed, for that political will and required efforts are needed. — Dr. Ashwani Mahajan
Recently, in the Multidimensional Poverty Index 2023 Report published by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), India has been highly praised that it has performed better than other countries in poverty alleviation. In 2015, the first of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), SDG 1, expected the world to end all forms of poverty by 2030. The report of the year 2023 has come almost in the middle of the 15 years set for this goal, in which satisfaction has been expressed that significant progress has been made towards this goal globally.
What is multidimensional poverty?
Internationally, the UNDP uses a definition of poverty called multidimensional poverty. This definition is same for all the countries. Due to the different definitions of poverty used by the governments of different countries in the world, an uniform assessment of poverty is not possible and due to this, comparison between different countries of the world also becomes difficult.
UNDP's measurement of multidimensional poverty includes a number of deprivation elements, which are common to all countries. It includes nutrition, child mortality, years of schooling, school attendance, cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and assets. It is worth noting that based on the availability of data in different countries, multidimensional poverty has been estimated in different years. Therefore, a comparative study of poverty in different countries in any one year is not possible with UNDP data. The preliminary data available with UNDP for different countries starts from 2005-06 till 2019-21. Therefore, to find out how much and when the poverty has reduced comparatively in the countries of the world during a certain period, is not possible from the data published in the report. In the context of India, the UNDP data details three years, 2005-06, 2015-16 and 2019-21. According to this data, in India in the year 2005-06, 55.1 percent of the population i.e. 645 million people were suffering from multidimensional poverty. This figure reached 27.7 percent i.e. 370 million people in 2015-16 after 10 years. During these 10 years, the rate of decrease in the percentage of poverty was 6.6 percent annually. But in the period from 2015-16 to 2019-21, proportion of poor suffering from multidimensional poverty, declined to only 16.4 percent of the total population; and the total number of poor declined to only 23 crore. That is, in just 5 years, 14 crore people moved out of poverty, as pace of poverty reduction accelerated to more than 10 percent annually. It is important to highlight that between 2015-16 and 2019-21, the number of poor has declined by 38 percent in just 5 years, including more than one year of worst pandemic. In such a situation, it would be necessary to understand that what happened so special during this period, that poverty reduction accelerated unprecedentedly, which made UNDP to praise India.
This is good news for India, but it is also an important news and lesson for the world. Since UNDP has first published the figures of multidimensional poverty, though, they are for different years, out of 150.8 crore poor people in 81 countries (about which the agency has published data) assessed by UNDP, 64.5 crore people were from India. That is, more than 42.8 percent of the poor of these 81 countries lived in India. But the latest figures of UNDP show that the total number of poor in these 81 countries of the world has now reduced to 974 million, but the notable and interesting fact about this is that the contribution of this number from India is only 230 million. That is, now only 23.7 percent of the poor people of these 81 countries come from India. This also means that the contribution of some other countries in number of people under multidimensional poverty has already increased. Not only this, while the combined Multidimensional Poverty Index of 81 countries has come down from 0.275 to 0.203 now, India's index has come down from 0.283 in 2005-06 to 0.122 in 2015-16 and just 0.069 in 2019-21, which is a great achievement. It is a matter of pride for India and cause of concern for the world. The world needs to take a lesson from this that it should also expedite efforts to remove multidimensional poverty on the model of India.
Although some of the benefits of consistent growth in India continued to reach the poor, the rate of poverty reduction has generally been lower in comparison to the rate of growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The reason for this is that the GDP and per capita income in the country definitely increased, but the inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth also widened alongside. This means that the growth had benefited rich more than the the poor. For this reason, from the point of view of various dimensions of poverty, the condition of the poor did not improve on expected lines in the past.
What is India's (say Narendra Modi) model
The Narendra Modi government had a special focus on the determinants of multidimensional poverty. Today the child mortality rate in India has come down to just 1.5 per cent, which was 2.2 per cent in 2015-16. This is a living proof of better health of Indian children, than before. There is also a huge improvement in nutrition and the percentage of malnourished children, which has come down from 44.3 per cent in 2005-06 to 21.1 per cent in 2015-16 and to only 11.8% in 2019-21. Talking about housing, about 3 crore houses have been built so far in the last 8 years, under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, both urban and rural, on which assistance of Rs 5 lakh crore (approximately $60 billion) has been given by the Central Government. Due to Corona, the target of pucca housing for all was not met on time, but by now hardly a few million people are left who do not have a pucca house. According to UNDP, a total of 23.5 percent of the population was deprived of pucca and comfortable houses in the year 2015-16 and only 13.6 percent in 2019-21.
Har Ghar Nal Se Jal (Piped Water to All Homes), another ambitious scheme of the Narendra Modi government, has worked swiftly and now according to UNDP only 2.7 per cent of the population was deprived of safe drinking water in 2019-21. Talking about sanitation, 11 crore toilets have been constructed in the last 8 years. Under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, 9.59 crore gas connections have been given till March 2023 to poor women, and by March 2023, there were a total of 31.26 crore LPG gas connections in the country. It is believed that there is a very small percentage of our population left who do not have access to clean cooking fuel in the form of a LPG gas connection. Various efforts of the government in the context of hunger and nutrition are also seen to be bearing fruit and due to provision of free ration to 80 crore people during the Corona period, the possibility of starvation for the poorest of the poor has been reduced to zero. Today, electricity has reached even the remotest villages in the country and the government claims that 100 percent of the villages in the country have been electrified.
This is a lesson for the world. Multidimensional poverty can also be removed, for that political will and required efforts are needed.
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