Nearly 250m Indians moved out of poverty in 9 years: govt

Multidimensional Poverty Index shows decline from 29.17% to 11.28% from 2014 to 2023

NEW DELHI:

Nearly 250 million people moved out from poverty in India during the past nine years, claimed an official statement issued by the federal government on Monday.

The findings were made in a discussion paper "Multidimensional Poverty in India since 2005-06" released by the country's top think-tank National Institution for Transforming India Aayog or NITI Aayog. Oxford Policy and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) are learnt to have provided technical inputs for this paper.

Credit was given to the significant initiatives of the federal government to address all dimensions of poverty between 2013-14 and 2022-23. The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) is a globally recognised comprehensive measure that captures poverty in multiple dimensions beyond monetary aspects.

Read also: One-tenth of India's population escaped poverty in 5 years: government report

MPI's global methodology is based on the robust "Alkire and Foster (AF)" method that identifies people as poor based on universally acknowledged metrics designed to assess acute poverty, providing a complementary perspective to conventional monetary poverty measures.

According to the Discussion Paper, India has registered a significant decline in multidimensional poverty in India from 29.17 percent in 2013-14 to 11.28 percent in 2022-23, i.e. a reduction of 17.89 percentage points.