UN applauds India's remarkable reduction in poverty, 415 mn people came out of poverty in 15 years

415 million people came out of poverty in India within 15 years between the years 2005/2006 and 2019/2021, with incidence falling from 55.1 per cent in 2005/2006 to 16.4 per cent in 2019/2021, the United Nations (UN) said on Tuesday. 

UN highlighted that this is a remarkable achievement by India.

The latest update of the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) was released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford, which revealed the data.

The report finding shows that 25 countries, including India, successfully halved their global MPI values within 15 years, which shows that rapid progress is possible.  These countries include Cambodia, China, Congo, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Serbia, and Vietnam.

According to the UN, in April this year, India surpassed China to become the world's most populous nation, with 142.86 crore people.

"Notably, India saw a remarkable reduction in poverty, with 415 million people exiting poverty within a span of just 15 years (2005/6 19/21)," the report stated.

The report emphasises on the fact that poverty reduction is achievable. However, it said that the lack of comprehensive data during the COVID-19 pandemic poses challenges in assessing immediate prospects.

In 2005/2006, about 645 million people were in multidimensional poverty in India, declining to about 370 million in 2015/2016 and 230 million in 2019/2021.

The report said that deprivation has declined in India, and "the poorest states and groups, including children and people in disadvantaged caste groups, had the fastest absolute progress."

The report also states that countries with different incidences of poverty also halved their global MPI value. While 17 countries did so with an incidence under 25 per cent in the first period, India and Congo had a starting incidence above 50 per cent.

India was among the 19 countries that halved their global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) value during one period - for India; it was 2005/2006, 2015/2016.

Director of the Human Development Report Office, Pedro Concei o, said, "As we reach the mid-point of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, we can clearly see that there was steady progress in multidimensional poverty reduction before the pandemic.”

"However, the negative impacts of the pandemic in dimensions such as education are significant and can have long-lasting consequences. It is imperative that we intensify efforts to comprehend the dimensions most negatively affected, necessitating strengthened data collection and policy efforts to get poverty reduction back on track," Concei o added.

Observation from a few countries where data were solely collected in 2021 or 2022, Mexico, Madagascar, Cambodia, Peru, and Nigeria, momentum on poverty reduction may have persisted during the pandemic, UNDP said in a press release.

Cambodia, Peru, and Nigeria showed significant reductions in their most recent periods, offering hope that progress is still possible. In Cambodia, the most encouraging case among these, the incidence of poverty fell from 36.7 per cent to 16.6 per cent, and the number of poor people halved, from 5.6 million to 2.8 million, all within 7.5 years, including the pandemic years (2014 2021/22).

However, the full impacts globally remain to be measured, it said.

With a renewed emphasis on data collection, "we need to broaden the picture to include the impacts of the pandemic on children," the press release stated.

"In over half the countries covered, there was either no statistically significant reduction in child poverty or the MPI value fell more slowly among children than among adults during at least one period. This suggests that child poverty will continue to be a pressing issue, particularly in relation to school attendance and undernutrition," it said.

Director of OPHI at the University of Oxford, Sabina Alkire, said the scarcity of data on multidimensional poverty is hard to comprehend, news agency PTI reported.

"The world is reeling under a data deluge and gearing up for the next era of digital growth. Yet we do not have a post-pandemic line of sight for 1 billion of the 1.1 billion poor people," Alkire said.

"This problem is eminently solvable data on multidimensional poverty are faster to gather than most realise, requiring just 5 per cent of questions in the surveys we use. We call on funders and data scientists to make a breakthrough on poverty data, so the interconnected deprivations that strike poor people in real-time can be tracked and intercepted," she added.

(With PTI inputs)

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