The number of disadvantaged people in India could range from 34 million or 373 million, depending on the study. Despite some improvement, a true picture of poverty in the country is still impossible in the absence of a countrywide census, which was officially postponed due to the pandemic. Experts stress that the purpose of assistance programmes should be the redistribution of accumulated wealth.

Milan (AsiaNews) – Last week the United Nations praised India for reducing poverty over the past 15 years.

According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at Oxford University, 415 million Indians were lifted out of poverty between 2005-2006 and 2019-2021.

The two organisations used data to arrive at the Multidimensional Poverty Index, which is not based only on income levels but tries to measure poverty in relation to different aspects of people's lives.

As a unit of analysis, the family is assigned a "deprivation score" based on the weight assigned to each indicator, like education level, access to health services, rate of malnutrition, etc.

According to the National Multidimensional Poverty Index - A Progress Review 2023, poverty intensity in India has shrunk from 47.1 per cent in 2015-16 to 44.4 per cent in 2019-21. More specifically, based on the rate of malnutrition, disadvantaged people went from 44.3 per cent in 2005-2006 to 11.8 per cent in 2019-2021.

Infant mortality dropped from 4.5 per cent to 1.5 per cent. The proportion of people without cooking fuel went from 52.9 per cent to 13.9 per cent, while those without access to adequate sanitation dropped from 50.4 per cent to 11.3 per cent.

Indians disadvantaged in terms of access to drinking water went from 16.4 per cent to 2.7 per cent, while people without electricity or housing decreased from 29 per cent to 44.9 per cent and from 2.1 per cent to 13.6 per cent respectively.

What can be said about these statistics? First, despite lower percentages, a large part of the Indian population continues to be "multidimensionally" poor in absolute terms. Suffice it to say that 10 per cent of 1.5 billion – India’s current population – is still 150 million people.

The United Nations reports that over a billion people in the world are still poor in various respects, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, a region of which India is a part.

At the same time, there are at least five different estimates of the number of poor people in India, ranging from 34 to 373 million, in percentage terms that is 2.5 per cent to 29.5 per cent.

A major issue is the availability of countrywide data. The most important figures are those collected every 10 years by the census. The last one was in 2011. The one set for 2021 was postponed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, officially because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Indian government determines benefits as a function of the size of the disadvantaged population. The question therefore is? Why has the government not carried out the new census if the fresh data could show lower poverty rates, thus fewer benefits to pay out.

The last time the threshold used in India to determine the poverty line was updated in 2011 and corresponds to 1,000 rupees (US$ 12) or less per month in cities and 816 rupees (US$ 10) or less in rural areas. Under Indian law, people who fall below either are entitled to subsidised food rations and housing.

Prof Madhura Swaminathan, from the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, criticised the poverty threshold at the time, since it used a caloric intake that was less than required for a healthy diet, and did not include adequate expenditures in health and education.

Even those who live above the government’s poverty line lack access to basic facilities like housing, healthcare and education, as indicated by a report released last year.

Using the traditional measure of extreme poverty, the latter found that only 2.5 per cent of the population lived with just US$ 1.9 per day, thanks to major improvements adopted after 2014 when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power.

However, the authors of the same report suggested that the threshold should be raised to US$ 3.2 per day to better measure poverty. If this was done, Indians in disadvantaged conditions would be over 26 per cent of the population.

Other studies, using consumption data, show that despite a general reduction in poverty between 2011 and 2022, the number of poor people increased during the pandemic.

Still others point out that poverty eradication can only take place with more equitable economic growth, "since 87 per cent of poverty reduction has been due to economic growth,” this according to Amaresh Dubey, an economist and senior consultant at the independent economic policy research institute, National Council of Applied Economic Research in New Delhi.

In fact, “those who do not participate in the growth process directly need to be helped through poverty alleviation programmes,” he explained.

And this leads back to the starting point. Ministries cannot update the list of beneficiaries of poverty reduction programmes without government data from a new census.

• india
• poverty
• reduction
• census
• levels
• threshold
• united nations
• oxford university