The exercise is likely to help India arrive at poverty levels, years after the poverty line idea was dumped. The number of poor as well as poverty levels are crucial for any government to prioritise social sector schemes.
In 2014, the NDA government had junked the C Rangarajan committee report on poverty as it had pegged 100 million more poor vis-à-vis the last estimate based on the Tendulkar committee report.
Sources told ET that the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) is conducting the field work, while NITI Aayog is monitoring the performance of the country and states. The results will feed into UNDP’s Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) that ranks countries on the basis of health, education and living standards.
A senior official told ET that a meeting was held in NITI Aayog recently between Aayog and MoSPI officials to finalise methodology to assess poverty. Based on the findings, the Aayog will develop a poverty index that will rank states and union territories. The idea is to enable states to compete amongst themselves to bring more people out of poverty, which in turn will improve India’s UN Poverty Index rank.
As per global standards, multidimensional poverty is defined not simply by income, but via indicators like poor health, poor quality of work and the threat of violence. The UNDP Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) tracks deprivation across three dimensions and 10 indicators, namely health (child mortality, nutrition), education (years of schooling, enrollment) and living standards (water, sanitation, electricity, cooking fuel, floor, assets).
“Though we have isolated data sets on certain indicators like sanitation and drinking water, we need information on the number of households who have access to these. We need to improve our data sets,” said another official.
