India pulled 271m out of poverty during 2006-16: UN

United Nations, July 12 

Advertisement

India lifted 271 million people out of poverty between 2006 and 2016, recording the fastest reductions in the multidimensional poverty index values during the period with strong improvements in areas such as “assets, cooking fuel, sanitation and nutrition”,  a report by the United Nations said.

The 2019 global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) from the UN Development Programme, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative was released on Thursday. The report said in the 101 countries studied — 31 low income, 68 middle income and two high income — 1.3 billion people are 

“multidimensionally poor”, which means that poverty is defined not simply by income, but by a number of indicators, including poor health, poor quality of work and the threat of violence.

The report identifies 10 countries, with a combined population of around 2 billion people, to illustrate the level of poverty reduction, and all of them have shown statistically significant progress towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal 1, namely ending poverty “in all its forms, everywhere”. 

The 10 countries are Bangladesh, Cambodia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru and Vietnam. The report said within these 10 countries, data shows that 270 million people moved out of multidimensional poverty from one survey to the next.  “This progress was largely driven by South Asia. In India, there were 271 million fewer people in poverty in 2016 than in 2006, while in Bangladesh the number dropped by 19 million between 2004 and 2014,” it said.

The report noted that of the 10 selected countries for which changes over time were analysed, India and Cambodia reduced their MPI values the fastest and they did not leave the poorest groups behind.  India’s MPI value reduced from 0.283 in 2005-06 to 0.123 in 2015-16. — PTI