A measure of poverty that counts how many people are deprived in several basic aspects of life at once, such as health, education and living standards, and how severe those deprivations are, instead of relying only on income or consumption.
Deep-dive lesson:Inclusive Growth, Poverty and Inequality. This page is a quick reference that connects the term across subjects; read the lesson for the full treatment.
For decades, poverty in India was measured by a money line: a household was poor if its spending fell below a level considered enough for minimum food and other needs. Expert groups led by Lakdawala, Tendulkar and Rangarajan debated where to draw the line, and the numbers shifted widely with each method. Money-based lines miss many things that matter, though. A family might spend above the line yet have no toilet, no clean cooking fuel, a malnourished child or no member who finished school.
Economists Sabina Alkire and James Foster at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative developed a method that counts deprivations across several dimensions and combines them into a single index. In 2010 the UNDP's Human Development Report adopted a Global MPI based on this method, replacing the earlier Human Poverty Index. India built its own version through NITI Aayog, first released in 2021 using National Family Health Survey data, as part of a government effort to track reform and performance indicators. This page focuses on how the index is constructed and read, which is the part most often misunderstood.
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