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.