If
government sources - and the World Bank - are to be
believed, poverty in India has declined significantly
in the past two decades. Even as newer assessments of
income poverty emerge (as with the Report of the Tendulkar
Committee on Poverty Estimates) that raise the proportion
of people below the poverty line, it is still argued
that this proportion may be higher than earlier thought,
but has still come down a lot during the period of high
economic growth.
Of
course there are many criticisms of this approach to
measuring income poverty, including the argument that
it has moved very far away from the original focus on
minimum calorie intake that earlier served as the basis
for the definition of the poverty line. But there may
be other serious criticisms that question the definition
of poverty based on a very limited notion of money incomes
and expenditure.
To some people, this may seem a bit of a strange criticism.
Isn't the link between poverty and lack of income or
assets so obvious as to preclude any debate? Obviously,
the poor are those who do not have income or assets,
so what's the point of querying that? The answer is
that a single-minded focus on income poverty may actually
detract from policies that are designed to reduce poverty,
and may even miss out one of the aspects that make poor
people most vulnerable.
It is increasingly being realised that poverty is much
more than a lack of adequate income: it is most fundamentally
the deprivation of a person's ability to live as a free
and dignified human being, with the full potential to
achieve her or his goals in life.
The UN World Summit for Social Development of 2006 described
poverty as follows: ''Poverty has various manifestations,
including lack of income and productive resources sufficient
to ensure sustainable livelihoods; hunger and malnutrition;
ill-health; limited or lack of access to education and
other basic services; increased morbidity and mortality
from illness; homelessness and inadequate housing; unsafe
environments; and social discrimination and exclusion.
It is also characterized by a lack of participation
in decision-making and in civil, social and cultural
life.''
This approach is not dissociated from income and economic
growth, especially since livelihood and income from
employment play such important roles in determining
whether a person or household is poor. But it does highlight
three important elements of poverty that can be lost
in a purely income-based approach: restrictions in opportunities,
vulnerability to shocks and social exclusion.
This is why recently there have been efforts to develop
broader concepts of poverty that recognise its multidimensional
nature and allow for interventions that address different
dimensions of poverty. The ''human poverty'' approach
developed by Amartya Sen and Sudhir Anand talked about
poverty as the absence of some basic capabilities to
function, and thus brought in health and education indicators
along with material standards of living.
More recently, UNICEF introduced a multidimensional
approach to child poverty, which identified seven dimensions
in which children can be deprived: shelter, sanitation,
safe drinking water, information, food, education and
health. Threshold levels were defined for each dimension,
and children who were seen to be deficient in two or
more were poor while those deficient in four or more
were extremely deprived.
This generated some startling information on the extent
of child poverty, with much greater incidence of child
poverty in most developing countries that emerges from
a simple reliance on income poverty lines.
Building on such work, the Oxford Poverty & Human
Development Initiative (OPHI) and UNDP have worked out
a Multidimensional Poverty Index. This index is based
on a range of deprivations at the household level, from
education to health outcomes to assets and services.
Education indicators include years of schooling and
child enrolment; health indicators used are child mortality
and nutrition; standard of living indicators include
electricity and drinking water access, sanitation, flooring,
cooking fuel and certain basic physical assets.
A person is defined as poor if she or he is deficient
in at least 30 per cent of the weighted indicators.
It is true that there are difficulties in getting adequate
data to provide an accurate measure. To be a good measure
of poverty or deprivation, the dataset must refer to
the same set of households. It cannot be assumed that
the different indicators overlap. However, consumer
expenditure or income surveys on which income data are
based do not provide data on the other indicators, which
must be taken from several different sources.
Even with these limitations, the MPI provides quite
different estimates of poverty. In India, the proportion
of poor in MPI terms comes to 55 per cent, compared
to around 30 per cent on the basis of the official poverty
line and 42 per cent using the World Bank's $1.25 per
day measure.
What may be even more significant from a policy point
of view is the information the MPI provides on the most
extensive deprivations. The most widespread deprivations
are in cooking fuel (52 per cent), sanitation (49 per
cent), nutrition (39 per cent) and quality of flooring
(40 per cent). In rural India, nutrition, child mortality
and education indicators are the greatest contributors
to the overall deprivation.
For a government that is genuinely concerned with improving
the lot of its citizens, this can constitute extremely
important information to focus its policy interventions.
But then maybe the citizenry also has to become more
vocal in demanding such attention from the government.
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