UN praises India’s ‘remarkable’ poverty reduction

A total of 415 million people in India came out of poverty within a span of just 15 years from 2005/2006 to 2019/ 2021, the United Nations said on Tuesday highlighting the remarkable improvement in human development parameters by the world’s most populous country. The latest update of the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) with estimates for 110 countries was released today by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford. Poverty entails more than the lack of income and productive resources to ensure sustainable livelihoods. People living on less than USD 1.90 a day typically is considered to be in poverty. Besides India, China lifted 69 million out of poverty between 2010-2014, and Indonesia 8 million between 2012-2017. In neighbouring Bangladesh and Pakistan, 19 million and 7 million individuals came out of poverty during 2015-2019 and 2012-2018, respectively, the UN report said. The report asserted that poverty reduction is achievable. The analysis of trends from 2000 to 2022, focused on 81 countries, according to the report, revealed that 25 countries successfully halved their global MPI values within 15 years. Many countries have halved their MPI in as short as four to 12 years. Among those countries include India, Cambodia, China, Congo, Honduras, Indonesia, Morocco, Serbia, and Viet Nam, it said, reiterating rapid progress is attainable. The poverty levels in Cambodia, Peru, and Nigeria have shown significant reductions recently. For Cambodia, the most encouraging case among these according to the report is the incidence of poverty falling from 36.7 per cent to 16.6 per cent, and the number of poor people halved, from 5.6 million to 2.8 million, all within 7.5 years, including pandemic years.