13.5 crore Indians move out of multidimensional poverty in five years: Niti Aayog report

Source: The post is based on the article “13.5 crore Indians move out of multidimensional poverty in five years: Niti Aayog report”  published in The Hindu on 18th July 2023

What is the News?

Niti Aayog has published the second edition of National Multidimensional Poverty Index: A progress of Review 2023.

What is the National Multidimensional Poverty Index?

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National MPI 2023 is based on the latest National Family Health Survey (2019-21) and represents progress made by India in reducing multidimensional poverty between the two surveys, NFHS-4 (2015-16) and NFHS-5 (2019-21).

What are the key findings of the National Multidimensional Poverty Index 2023?

Source: The Print

About 135.5 million (13.5 crore) persons have exited poverty between 2015-16 and 2019-21.

– In 2015-16, one in four Indians (24.85%) met the criteria for multidimensional poverty. By 2019-21, this percentage decreased to 14.96% or one in seven.

Rural areas saw a faster reduction in their MPI value, compared to urban areas. The incidence of poverty fell from 32.59% to 19.28% in rural areas compared to a decline from 8.65% to 5.27% in urban areas between 2015-16 and 2019-21.

Uttar Pradesh has registered the largest decline in the number of poor with 3.43 crore people escaping multidimensional poverty.

The number of states with less than 10 per cent people living in multidimensional poverty doubled in the five years between 2016 and 2021.

– In 2015-16 (NFHS-4), only seven states had less than 10% of their population living in multidimensional poverty — Mizoram, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Goa, and Kerala.

– In 2019-21 (NFHS-5), the list had doubled to include 14 states, with the seven new additions being Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Manipur, and Uttarakhand.

Except for Bihar, no other state in India has more than one-third of its population living in multidimensional poverty.

– Even Bihar has also made remarkable improvement. In 2015-16, over 51.89 per cent of Bihar’s population lived in multidimensional poverty. By 2019-21, the figure had dropped to 33.76 per cent.