The World's Biggest 'Democracy' - Home To 28.5% Living In Destitution

The 2014 global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) by researchers at the University of Oxford covers 108 countries: 

31 Low-Income Countries, 67 Middle-Income Countries and 10 High-Income Countries. These countries have a total population of  5.4 billion people , some 78% of the world's population. 

The MPI assesses poverty at the individual level.  If someone is deprived in a third or more of ten weighted indicators, the global index identifies them as ‘MPI poor' , and  the extent – or intensity – of their poverty is measured by the number of deprivations they are experiencing . Those indicators are based on health, education and living standards and comprise the following factors: years of schooling, school attendance, levels of nutrition, child mortality, access to cooking fuel, sanitation (open defecation, for example), access to water, ownership of assets, access to electricity and flooring material (eg, dirt). 

Based on a rural-urban analysis,  of the 1.6 billion people identified as MPI poor, 85% live in rural areas . This is significantly higher than estimates of 70-75% in poverty, where income is used as the basis for determining poverty.

Poverty reduction is not necessarily uniform across all poor people in a country or across population subgroups. An overall improvement may leave the poorest of the poor behind.  The highest levels of inequality are to be found in 15 Sub-Saharan African countries and in  Pakistan ,  India ,  Afghanistan ,  Yemen  and  Somalia . 

The researchers have paid special attention to the situation of the destitute, or what they term the  poorest of the poor .  Over half of the world's poor are classed as destitute .    

Countries which have reduced MPI poverty and destitution the most in absolute terms were mostly Low Income and Least Developed Countries, with Nepal making the fastest progress. 

The situation in India

Eradicating poverty in India requires every person having access to safe drinking water, sanitation, housing, nutrition, health and education. According to the MPI, out of its 1.2 billion-plus population, India  is home to over 340 million destitute people  and is the second poorest country in South Asia after war-torn Afghanistan. Some 640 million poor people live in India (40% of the world's poor), mostly in rural areas, meaning an individual is deprived in one-third or more of the ten indicators mentioned above (malnutrition, child deaths, defecating in the open).

In South Asia, Afghanistan has the highest level of destitution at 38%. This is followed by India at 28.5%. Bangladesh and Pakistan have much lower levels. The study placed Afghanistan as the poorest country in South Asia, followed by India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal. 

 

taken from an excellent article here by Colin Todhunter

Certainly GDP has been soaring in recent years but that says nothing about the lives, livelihoods and living conditions of the vast majority of the country. It is a statistic relevant only to capitalists thinking of the bottom line and investment opportunities.