Uneven development

India must reassess its affirmative action programmes

In 2019, the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) report revealed that India had lifted 271 million people out of poverty between 2006 and 2016, recording one of the fastest reductions in index values, according to the annual study conducted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). Multidimensional poverty measures poverty not just in terms of income but access to health care, education, and general living standards (drinking water, safety, electricity, housing, and so on) and offers a more realistic view of social standards. While the decadal data was a justifiable cause for celebration, especially on metrics such as infant mortality, the concern remains the fruits of rapid economic growth were unevenly distributed. This year’s MPI confirmed that. It studied that aspect in greater detail in 41 of the 109 developing countries on the index and its findings underline the point that the incidence of multidimensional poverty is exponentially greater for socially marginalised sections of society that, coincidentally, are the focus of India’s affirmative action programmes.

The 2021 MPI study is based on the 2015-16 survey data and, therefore, does not include the impact of major disruptive events to livelihoods since then — demonetisation in 2016, the Covid-19-induced lockdown of 2020, and the second wave of the pandemic in early 2021. All the same, the broad indicators suggest there is work to be done in truly achieving sabka saath, sabka vikas, the signature slogan of the National Democratic Alliance government. Even as India was being feted for rapid poverty reduction, the UNDP-OPHI study showed that nearly 27.9 per cent of Indians were multi-dimensionally poor and another 19.3 per cent classified as vulnerable to multidimensional poverty. For China, India’s Asian rival, the corresponding figures are 3.9 per cent and 17.4 per cent, a potent pointer to the power of efficient economic reform. But a more apt comparison may lie in neighbouring Bangladesh, where the focus on low-cost manufacturing has had a salutary impact on incomes and livelihoods; 24.6 per cent of the population were multi-dimensionally poor and 18.2 per cent classified as vulnerable to multidimensional poverty.

In India, however, the key concern is the metrics that highlight the concentration of deprivation. More than half (50.6 per cent) of the scheduled tribes (STs), a third (33.3 per cent) of the scheduled castes (SCs), and over a quarter (27.2 per cent) of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) suffered multidimensional poverty. This contrasts with 15.6 per cent among those outside these reserved groups and 21.6 per cent for those that belonged to no caste or tribe. Worse, the level of deprivation they suffer is high. The intensity of deprivations, which is the average deprivation score among people living in multidimensional poverty, for the STs was 45.9, for the SCs 44.1, and for the OBCs 43.5. If these are the numbers when India’s economy was recording higher growth, it is worth wondering how they fared when growth slowed after 2016 and then stalled because of the pandemic. Overall, this data offers a compelling argument for a constructive reassessment of India’s affirmative action programmes. Though the index does show that efforts have borne fruit in areas such as infant mortality, electricity and water availability, the need of the hour is clearly towards affirmative action in terms of access to health and education. That would be an effective way of equipping poor people with tools to access economic opportunities and overcome ingrained societal prejudices that keep them mired in sub-Saharan standards of living.