We are poorer than we thought

A new measure of poverty has shown that just eight Indian states have more poor people than 26 of the poorest African nations together. So much for our grand economic success story.
Being worse off than Sub-Saharan Africa is serious. And we do it so effortlessly. Just eight states, mind you, of one country — our shining India — offered 421 million really poor people, while the top 26 poor countries of Africa, the dark continent known for poverty, famines and wars, could together come up with only 410 million. Chak de India!

The eight states — Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Rajasthan — are not new to the game of poverty. But what the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) shows is that they are poor not just because they lack money but also because they have abysmal standards of living. And no, the two are not umbilically attached.

The MPI was developed at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative under the leadership of development economist Sabina Alkire. It goes beyond money to measure levels of poverty. It looks at a range of deprivations in the household, of which income is just one factor. It looks at human development, and what makes one poor. And this holistic approach to assessing poverty can force us to look at human beings rather than at beguiling figures like the GDP.

To measure poverty through the MPI, one examines a situation from various angles, using different indicators of poverty, like education, health, housing, nutrition, assets and access to basic services like drinking water, sanitation, cooking fuel and electricity. And assessed this way, it turns out that more than half the world’s poor live in south Asia (51%), and just over a quarter (28%) in Africa.

Take the glorious case of our own country. We have had rapid economic growth, more income and less poverty measured in cold monetary terms. Yet our development indicators are as bad as before, endemic hunger still rules, and child malnutrition remains at almost 50%. How poor you actually are could depend as much on your own income as on the social investment made by the state. To overcome poverty we need to recognise it — and that’s where the MPI could be an enormous help. Especially when we are looking at targeted spending of limited public resources.

But coming back to the shame factor, this is not the first time that India has been compared unfavourably with the poorest countries of Africa. The definitive study by Peter Svedberg, development economist at Stockholm University, comparing food insecurity and endemic hunger in India and sub-Saharan Africa (we were worse off, mostly) raised eyebrows in academic circles a few years ago, but nothing came of it in actual terms of policy. More recently, Abhijit Banerjee, development economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pointed out that the state of maternal and child health in India is much worse than in sub-Saharan Africa. He was also pretty critical of the government’s ways of dealing with such failures.

Meanwhile, it is clear that India — and south Asia — will not be able to meet the millennium development goals. According to a recent United Nations report, no progress had been made in the last two decades in reducing hunger levels in south Asia. Happily, however, hunger levels have fallen somewhat in sub-Saharan Africa.

Incidentally, the MPI method can also be used to monitor and evaluate programmes and policies. It has been taken up by Mexico to create their own multi-dimensional measure of poverty and Bhutan uses it to calculate Gross National Happiness. Maybe we can use it in parts. It may help us get to that fantastic, elusive ‘inclusive development’.