According to the United Nations, India has achieved great success in reducing poverty, with 415 million people lifted out of poverty in a short period of 15 years, from 2005/2006 to 2019/2021. This has been announced in the latest update of the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), published by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford. The report shows that 25 countries, including India, have managed to reduce their global MPI values over a 15-year period, indicating that progress can be made quickly. Some of the countries that have achieved this feat include Cambodia, China, Congo, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Serbia, and Vietnam. In April, India overtook China to become the world's most populous country, with a population of 1.4286 billion, according to UN data. While this report shows that it is possible to reduce poverty, it also recognizes the challenges caused by the lack of adequate data during the COVID-19 pandemic, which makes it difficult to assess expectations. directly. In the case of India, poverty fell from 55.1% in 2005/2006 to 16.4% in 2019/2021, which means that 415 million people have been lifted out of poverty this time. In 2005/2006, about 645 million people in India were living in multidimensional poverty. This number fell to around 370 million in 2015/2016 and further fell to 230 million in 2019/2021, reflecting a significant reduction in poverty levels. According to the report, the number of people suffering from poverty and scarcity as a food indicator in India went from 44.3% in 2005/2006 to 11.8% in 2019/2021, and child mortality fell from 4.5% to 1.5%. According to the report, the poor and those without cooking oil increased from 52.9% to 13.9%, and the unsanitary decreased from 50.4% in 2005/2006 to 11.3% in 2019/2021.
In the drinking water indicator, the percentage of people suffering from poverty and lack of many things fell from 16.4 to 2.7 during the period, electricity (from 29% to 2.1%) and housing from 44.9% to 13.6%. The report shows that countries with different levels of poverty have reduced their overall MPI value. Although 17 countries performed below 25% in the first period, India and Congo had the first positions above 50%. India is among the 19 countries that have decreased the value of the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) in one period - for India it was 2005/2006-2015/2016. According to the 2023 release, 1.1 billion out of 6.1 billion people (more than 18%) live in multidimensional poverty in 110 countries. Sub-Saharan Africa (534 million) and South Asia (389 million) are home to about five out of six poor people. Nearly two-thirds of all poor people (730 million people) live in middle-income countries, and action in these countries is essential to reducing global poverty. together. Although low-income countries represent only 10% of the population in the MPI, this is where 35% of all poor people live. Children under the age of 18 make up half of the MPI poor (566 million). The poverty rate among children is 27.7%, while for adults it is 13.4%. Poverty mostly affects rural areas, with 84% of all poor people living in rural areas. Rural communities are poorer than urban communities in all regions of the world. Various countries have halved their MPI in a short period of time such as four years to twelve years, showing the feasibility of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of reducing poverty according to national definitions. 'in fifteen years. Therefore, it is very important to consider the situation-specific situation-specific multidimensional poverty indices that reflect the country's definition of poverty while the global MPI evaluates multidimensional poverty in a single system, such as reports. The agency added, however, that despite these encouraging measures, the lack of epidemiological data for most of the 110 countries covered by the global MPI hinders the understanding of the disease's impact on poverty.
A press release issued by the UNDP said that the case of a few countries where data was collected only in 2021 or 2022 - Mexico, Madagascar, Cambodia, Peru, and Nigeria - the reduction of poverty can be sustained during this epidemic. Cambodia, Peru, and Nigeria showed significant declines in their last season, raising hopes that progress is still possible. In Cambodia, the most encouraging case among these, poverty fell from 36.7% to 16.6%, and the number of poor fell by half, from 5.6 million to 2.8 million, all in 7.5 years, including the year of illness fly away. (2014-2021/22). The global MPI measures poverty reduction and makes predictions, showing how people experience poverty in different areas of their daily lives - from access to education and health to quality of life. to housing, drinking water, sanitation, and electricity. The MPI can be defined as a poverty index as an aggregated roof that has nothing to do with the poor, with the aim of eliminating those deficits.
"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 said. The report noted that deprivation in all indicators declined in India, and "the poorest states and groups, including children and people in disadvantaged caste groups, had the fastest absolute progress." "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," the Director of the Human Development Report Office, Pedro Conceicao, said. "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 .
"we need to broaden the picture to include the impacts of the pandemic on children," the press release said. "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, let alone justify. "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.
