41.5 crore people emerged out of poverty in India since 2005, but country still has largest poor population globally: UN Report

NEW DELHI: Nearly 415 million people in India emerged out of the "poverty" bracket between 2005-06 and 2019-21, the UN has said in a report.
The new Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) released on Monday by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) termed the achievement a "historic change."

The effort demonstrated that the Sustainable Development Goal target of reducing at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty by 2030 is possible to achieve, even at a large scale, it said.
The report in a further break-down says that 275 million in India moved out of poverty between 2005-06 and 2015-16, and 140 million between 2015-16 and 2019-21.
Analysing the perfromance of individual states, the report said that Bihar, the poorest state in 2015-16, saw the fastest reduction in MPI value in absolute terms.
The percentage of poor in Bihar fell from 77.4 % in 2005-06 to 52.4 % in 2015-16 and further to 34.7 % in 2019-21, it said.
However in relative terms, the poorest states have not quite caught up. Of the 10 poorest states in 2015/2016, only one (West Bengal) have emerged out of the list in 2019-21.
The rest — Bihar, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan — remain among the 10 poorest.
The percentage of poor is 21.2 % in rural areas compared with 5.5 % in urban areas. Rural areas account for nearly 90 % of poor people, accounting for 205 million of the nearly 229 million poor in India.
The report also said that incidence of poverty fell from 34.7 % to 21.8 % among children and from 24.0 % to 13.9 percent among adults.
Despite the impressive strides, India continues to be home to the largest number of poor people worldwide (228.9 million), followed by Nigeria (96.7 million projected in 2020), according to 2020 population data.
India still has the highest number of poor children in the world (97 million, or 21.8 % of children aged 0–17 years), it said.
Poverty is more prevalent among female-headed households (19.7%) than among male-headed households (15.9%), the report said.
“Despite tremendous gains, the ongoing task of ending poverty for the 228.9 million poor people in 2019/2021 is daunting — especially as the number has nearly certainly risen since the data were collected," it said.
Also, it that the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on poverty in India cannot be fully assessed because 71 % of the data from the 2019/2021 Demographic and Health Survey for the country were collected before the pandemic.
The analysis looks at the most common deprivation profiles across 111 developing countries. The most common profile includes deprivations in four indicators: nutrition, cooking fuel, sanitation and housing.
More than 45.5 million poor people are deprived in only these four indicators. Of those people, 34.4 million live in India, 2.1 million in Bangladesh and 1.9 million in Pakistan.