India saw significant decline in multidimensional poverty in 5 years: NITI

Uttar Pradesh recorded the steepest decline in the number of poor with 34.3 million people escaping multidimensional poverty, according to the report

About 135 million people in the country moved out of multidimensional poverty between 2015-16 and 2019-21, the NITI Aayog said in its report "National Multidimensional Poverty Index: A Progress Review 2023". Uttar Pradesh recorded the steepest decline in the number of poor with "34.3 million people escaping multidimensional poverty" followed by Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, and Rajasthan, according to the report.

The country recorded a  "significant decline" of 9.89 percentage points in the number of India’s multidimensionally poor from 24.85 per cent in 2015-16 to 14.96 per cent in 2019-2021, NITI Aayog stated. Rural areas in the country saw a decline in poverty levels from  32.59 per cent to 19.28 per cent while the urban areas saw a reduction in poverty from 8.65 per cent to 5.27 per cent.

The policy think tank said that the index measures deprivations across the three equally weighted dimensions of health, education, and standard of living, which are represented by 12 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)-aligned indicators. These include nutrition, child and adolescent mortality, maternal health, years of schooling, school attendance, cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, assets, and bank accounts. "Marked improvement is witnessed across all the 12 indicators," the think tank said in its report.

The report said that between 2015-16 and 2019-21, the MPI value has nearly halved from 0.117 to 0.066 and the intensity of poverty has reduced from 47 per cent to 44 per cent, which set the country "on the path of achieving the SDG Target 1.2 -- of reducing multidimensional poverty by at least half -- much ahead of the stipulated timeline of 2030".

The NITI Aayog said that the followed methodology aligns with global standards.