“With this, India is much ahead of the target of reducing poverty in all its dimensions by half, by the year 2030,” the paper had said.
The government is developing a national indicator to measure “extreme poverty”, as it aims to eradicate the same for the entire population of the country by 2030, the statistics ministry has said. The government reckons anyone with income below $1.25/a day as living in “extreme poverty”.
The comments by the ministry were made in a recent report titled, ‘National Indicator Framework 2024’, which measured the progress made by India in achieving its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The goal set by the minsitry assumes importance, as India has been without an official poverty line for a while, and the policy has shifted to from income-based poverty estimates to one based on multi-dimensional deprivations.
Two working papers for the World Bank and the IMF had earlier put out divergent estimates of the state of ‘extreme poverty’ in India, on the shared definition of people living on $1.9 or less in purchasing power parity terms. Interestingly, the World Bank definition of extreme poverty roughly corresponds to the poverty line computed by Tendulkar committee for 2004-05 (Rs 33 per day), if adjusted for inflation. A credible gauge of poverty for the country is all the more important now, given how the pandemic has caused “unprecedented reversals in poverty reduction.”
In the report, while quoting NITI Aayog, the ministry mentioned that in the past decade, India has seen a drastic reduction in poverty. It says that the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in “all its dimensions” reduced to 14.96% in 2019-21 from 24.85% in 2015-16.
This, it said, has been possible due to sustained economic growth during the period (6.7% average growth between FY16-FY20), and implementation of several welfare schemes focused on nutrition, health, education, housing, drinking water, sanitation, skill development, and social protection, the report said.
In a discussion paper in January, the NITI Aayog had said that an estimated 248.2 million people moved out of multidimensional poverty between 2013-14 and 2022-23, a key SDG goal. The SDGs adopted by the United Nations in 2015 have set an explicit target of halving multidimensional poverty by 2030.
Based on the interpolation of the multidimensional poverty index (MPI) estimates between 2005-06 and 2015-16, the headcount ratio for the year 2013-14 comes to 29.17%. Similarly, the proportion of multidimensional poverty for the year 2022-23 is projected to be 11.28% based on the trend rate of 10.66% decline per year between 2015-16 and 2019-21, the think tank noted.
“With this, India is much ahead of the target of reducing poverty in all its dimensions by half, by the year 2030,” the paper had said.
Source:financialexpress.com