The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted a resolution on December 22, 1992 where it declared October 17 as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. Since then, every year this day is used to recognise the struggles and efforts made by those who are forced to live below the poverty line, world over.
The number of poor people in India fell by about 415 million between 2005-06 and 2019-21, according to the new Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). This change is touted as ‘historic’ and is a clear step in the direction of achieving 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.
The term ‘poverty line’ refers to the minimum level of consumption that is estimated to be adequate in a particular country. In 2005, the Tendulkar Committee was established in 2005 and it was headed by Suresh D. Tendulkar. The main aim of this committee was to estimate poverty and the current methodology of poverty estimation is based on their suggestions. According to this, households having expenditure less than ₹816 per head per month in rural areas and ₹1000 per head per month in urban areas are living below the poverty line. The report is based on India’s 2020 population data and it is to be noted that our country (228.9 million) has the largest number of poor people worldwide, followed by Nigeria (96.7 million).
Despite all the progress made, the study has found that India’s population remains vulnerable thanks to factors like the COVID-19 pandemic and rising food and energy prices. Plus, the data that has been collected and taken into account to carry out the study is pre-pandemic and experts believe that the numbers have certainly risen since.
While the study shows that poverty among children fell faster in absolute terms, India still has the highest number of poor children in the world–21.8 per cent of children between the ages of 0-17. It also shows that across 111 countries, 1.2 billion people live in severe multidimensional poverty and half of this number are children under 18 years of age. The analysis looked at four indicators: nutrition, cooking fuel, sanitation and housing and found that 34.4 million living in India faced these common deprivations.