Poverty in India is one of the problems which the government has been trying to alleviate since decades now. Poverty is a social as well as an economic ill for any country that is looking to drive itself to development and is one agenda that must come out tops on any Government's list of priorities in order to create a healthy growing Nation. According to the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2022, a historic change can be seen around 415 million people in India - it seems 41.5 crore people in India have been uplifted out of poverty between 2005-06 and 2019-21. The incidence of poverty fell from 55 percent to just over 16 percent in this period.
Although there is a significant poverty reduction, in the year 2020 the largest number of poor people in the world was in India - with almost 228.9 million people being below the poverty line. The MPI (Multidimensional Poverty Index) value fell from 0.283 in 2005-2006 to 0.069 in 2019-2021. The incidence of poverty fell from 55.1 percent in 2005-2006 to 16.4 percent in 2019-2021.
The data reflect post-pandemic changes. The Covid-19 pandemic could set back the improvement made in poverty reduction globally by 3-10 years, also adding that the most current data on food security from the World Food Programme indicate that the number of people living in food crises has risen to 193 million in 2021.
According to the reports, the drop in poverty demonstrates that the “Sustainable Development Goal target 1.2" of reducing at least by half the proportion of men, women, and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions by 2030 is possible to achieve. India's progress has been commended considering the large scale of population and the demographic as well as geographic challenges that the Nation faces.
It can be seen that the poorest states in the country diminished poverty rapidly and deprivations in all indicators fell significantly among poor people. Poverty in children has fallen faster but India still has the highest number of poor children in the world. More than one in five children in India are poor (21.8 percent, or 97 million) compared with around one in seven adults (13.9 percent).
The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index is a key international resource that measures acute multidimensional poverty across more than 100 developing countries and was first launched in 2010 by the OPHI and the Human Development Report Office of the UNDP. This vast reduction in poverty is a historical change and will mark its impact on the overall economy of India in the future.
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