India's UDI like programmes can help target poverty: Report

Much more work needs to be done to end poverty, according to a new World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) report, but programmes like India's Unique Identification Number can significantly cut costs and improve targeting.

India and four other countries - Bangladesh, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nigeria - account for almost three-fifths of the world's extreme poor, according to Global Monitoring Report 2014-15 released Wednesday.

Adding five other countries - Ethiopia, Indonesia, Madagascar, Pakistan, and Tanzania - would comprise just over 70 percent of the extreme poor, it said.

The magnitude of extreme poverty was greatest in East Asia in 1990, the report said. Today sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia account for about 80 percent of the global poor.

According to the 2011 estimates, extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa was around 47 percent.

"Identifying and efficiently reaching the poor is a formidable challenge in many countries," the report said.

"Many of those who remain in extreme poverty are harder to reach, so that the administrative costs of safety net programmes tend to rise as poverty declines."

"However, recent developments in information and communications technology (ICT), such as India's new programme to provide all of its citizens and residences a unique official identity, have the potential to reduce these administrative costs significantly and improve targeting," it said.

The report details, for the first time, the World Bank Group's twin goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and promoting shared prosperity, measured as income growth of the bottom 40 percent.

"The world has made great progress in the last quarter-century in reducing extreme poverty - it was cut by a stunning two-thirds, and now we have the opportunity to end poverty in less than a generation," said World Bank Group president Jim Yong Kim.

The report notes that much success has been achieved in reducing extreme poverty - those living on less than a $1.25 a day.

However, the number of poor remains unacceptably high, at just over one billion people (14 percent of the world population) in 2011, compared with 1.2 billion (19 percent of the world population) in 2008.

Forecasts in the report show that poverty will remain stubbornly high in the South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa regions, where an estimated 377 million of the world's 412 million poor will likely reside in 2030.

In 2011, the two regions were home to 814 million of the world's one billion poor.

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)