Govt is ignoring multidimensional poverty in its poverty narrative

Santosh Mehrotra

India’s Prime Minister mentioned twice that around 13.5 crore Indians were lifted out of poverty during his first term from 2015-16 to 2019-21. Initially, he mentioned this in Parliament while responding to a no-confidence motion and later during his Independence Day address. These numbers were drawn from the National Multidimensional Poverty Index Report: A Progress Review 2023, released by NITI Aayog in July 2023. The report underscores that while there has been a significant reduction in the proportion of multidimensionally poor individuals in India (from 24.85 per cent in 2015-16 to 14.96 per cent in 2019-21), the intensity of poverty, which explains how poor they are, has only marginally decreased from 47 per cent to 44 per cent.

While the report’s estimate of the number of individuals emerging from poverty (the 13.5 crore figure) raises methodological concerns (which I will address later), an analysis of the MPI data through the lens of its 12 contributing indicators also reveals disquieting findings. The National MPI report noted that the MPI Head Count Ratio in India is 14.96%, indicating that around 203 million Indians still grapple with multidimensional poverty.

Analysing individual indicators paints an even more alarming picture. These indicators starkly expose the inadequacies of the government’s celebrated initiatives, such as PM Ujjwala Yojna, Swacch Bharat Abhiyan, POSHAN Abhiyan, and PM Awas Yojna. For example, regarding the cooking fuel indicator, a staggering 597.6 million people in India still experience deprivation; 563 million face housing deprivation, 429 million face nutritional deprivation, 410 million lack sanitation facilities, and
260 million are dealing with maternal health issues.

In the Prime Minister’s home state of Gujarat, over 8 million people are still grappling with multidimensional poverty. A disaggregated examination reveals that 38 per cent of Gujarat’s population experiences nutritional deprivation. Additionally, 34.7 per cent of households face deprivation on cooking fuel, 26.05 per cent struggle with sanitation, and 23.30 per cent encounter challenges with housing indicators of the MPI.

The lack of improvement in nutrition indicators is particularly concerning
for India’s prospects of becoming a ‘developed country’ by 2047.

First, India’s child malnutrition rate is as dire as that of sub-Saharan Africa. In 2019–21, 32.1 per cent of India’s under-fives are undernourished (or weigh too little), which is a slight improvement from 38.4 per cent in 2015. Additionally, 35.5 per cent are stunted or too short (compared to 38.4 per cent in 2015), and 19.3 per cent (21 per cent in 2015) are wasted (too thin) relative to the global reference population. Consequently, the PM’s Economic Advisory Council has proposed that India should consider using its own reference population instead of the global one.

In other words, rather than addressing the reasons for the nutritional shortfall, the government appears inclined to change the reference population itself. However, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) itself identifies contributory factors for these gloablly embarassing indicators, such as child feeding practices. First, if children are to be protected from infection, then they must be breastfed within one hour of birth. But the proportion of India’s children that were breastfed in 2015 was only 41.6%, and this figure barely increased to 41.8
in 2019–21.

Second, WHO standards recommend that children under 6 months be exclusively breastfed. While the share of children exclusively breastfed increased from 42.7 per cent to 45.9 per cent, over half of India’s infants are not. Third, if young children are not to become malnourished, they must receive solid or semi-solid food and breastmilk between ages 6 and 8 months, but the share of children receiving such a diet is still only 43.9%. Merely 11 per cent of children under 5 years receive an adequate diet, up from 9.6 per cent.

Finally, the fact that 410 million people lack safe sanitation facilities, despite Swach Bharat, remains a significant social determinant of nutritional outcomes. India still has the world’s largest population that defecates in the open, a situation that urgently needs correction to reduce child and adult malnutrition.

So why hasn’t the government addressed these problems by increasing funding for Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) and adding the second anganwadi worker in 200 high-burden districts within its Aspirational Districts Programme? This was not done in nine years, although we had suggested it in the 12th Five-Year Plan, but then the Planning Commission and the 12th Plan itself were scrapped in 2015, making India the only Asian country that does not have a Planning Commission. Strikingly, these issues have made little headway
even within the current government’s POSHAN programme.

Returning to the MPI, the author pointed out in an earlier piece (Deccan Herald, Aug 13) that NITI Ayog overestimates the number of MPI deprived individuals who were lifted above the deprivation line between 2015 and 2021, an overestimation of 135 million according to NITI’s calculations. NITI applied the poverty ratios for different years to the same estimated population (i.e., 2021), thereby exaggerating the reduction in deprivation. However, my former JNU colleague, Amitabh Kundu, made an astonishing claim that, contrary to all ethical and statistical principles, it is appropriate to compute the number of people lifted above poverty by applying the 2015 and 2021 ratios to the same terminal year population for India. This is not panel data, where the same population cohort is tracked over 2015 and 2021 to determine those falling into, and rising above, poverty. Instead, it is a point-to-point comparison for those two dates. It is dishonest to apply the higher Indian population (for 2021 to both 2015 and 2021) to appear to increase the numbers of those raised above the MPI poverty line.

Meanwhile, the news regarding income poverty in the last five years is discouraging. Using the NSO’s Periodic Labour Force Surveys (2017–22), J Parida and I estimated the poverty among workers, based on worker wages and self-employed earnings data, for the entire Indian workforce (not consumption expenditure data), using a poverty line of $2.15 per day (2017 PPP). Our findings indicate a rise in the incidence of poverty among workers over the last five years, resulting in an increase in the number of poor workers from about 94 million in 2017–18 to 142 million in 2020–21, an increase of 48 million. Although the number of poor workers decreased to 114 million in the post-Covid period (2021–22), this figure still surpasses the pre-Covid (2017–08) poverty numbers. These results contrast with the claims of both Roy and Weide (2022) and Bhalla, Virmani, and Bhasin (2022).

(The writer is a former head of division in the Planning Commission, Government of India, and editor of Planning in the 20th Century & Beyond)