India among five countries with most people living in poverty

India is among the five countries globally with the largest number of people living in poverty, according to a recent UN report.

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

It said that 1.1 billion people live in acute poverty worldwide, with 40 per cent living in countries experiencing war, fragility and/or low peacefulness, according to at least one of the three widely used datasets of conflict settings.

India has 234 million people living in poverty, which is medium Human Development Index, placing the country among five globally with the largest number of people living in poverty.

"The other four countries are Pakistan (93 million), Ethiopia (86 million), Nigeria (74 million) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (66 million), all low HDI," it said.

Together, these five countries account for nearly half (48.1 per cent) of the 1.1 billion poor people," it said.

The report added that a "staggering" 455 million of the world's poor live in countries exposed to violent conflict, hindering and even reversing hard-won progress to reduce poverty.

The report notes that over half of the 1.1 billion poor people are children under the age of 18 (584 million). Globally, 27.9 per cent of children live in poverty, compared with 13.5 per cent of adults.

Large proportions of the 1.1 billion poor people lack adequate sanitation (828 million), housing (886 million) or cooking fuel (998 million). Well over half of the 1.1 billion poor people live with a person who is undernourished in their household (637 million).

In South Asia 272 million poor people live in households with at least one undernourished person, and in Sub- Saharan Africa 256 million do, it said.

About 83.7 per cent of poor people live in rural areas. Across all world regions people in rural areas are poorer than people in urban areas. Overall, 28.0 per cent of the global rural population are poor, compared with 6.6 per cent of the urban population.