Almost fifteen years ago, India measured poverty by a simple metric: how much money a person spent. The Rangarajan Committee’s subsequent report in 2014 defined poverty as the condition of living on roughly Rs 47 a day in cities and Rs 32 in villages. About 29.5% of the Indian population fell below that line. It was a narrow lens that captured hunger but ignored the broader deprivations that keep people poor. Since then, India’s understanding of poverty has become more nuanced, taking into account health, education, housing, sanitation, and opportunity. The multidimensional poverty index, which the government emphasises, captures this reality, identifying deprivation across 12 basic indicators. By this measure, nearly 200 million Indians still face diverse hardships. Yet, this new way of measuring poverty has not changed how policy is designed. For instance, while India now acknowledges multidimensional poverty, it still tackles the challenge with siloed programmes on housing, nutrition, sanitation and so on. Better measurement without integrated policy means poverty estimation remains a fractious issue, statistically and methodologically. What is worse is the government’s denial of the situation on the ground. For instance, in 2024, the Narendra Modi government claimed that the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey showed that poverty was down to just about 5% of the population. But this was based only on consumption expenditure. The MPI for the same year put the figure at 11.28% of the population. This reveals the State’s discomfort with acknowledging that deprivation persists despite economic growth and welfare expansion.
Meaningful poverty reduction requires moving beyond headline numbers. First, India needs an official, credible national poverty line which is regularly updated, widely understood, and transparent. This will also have international implications as the fluid metrics of the data available from India affect the World Bank’s poverty estimates that allegedly paint a falsely positive image of poverty alleviation in India. Accurate data, once collected, must be used to design programmes that take into account multiple deprivations, not just low consumption. That means incomes, assets, health, education, sanitation and housing must be addressed in conjunction.
Othe countries have shown that tackling the right mix of challenges, such as education, healthcare access and robust social protections, can lead to enduring upward mobility. Brazil’s Bolsa Família and Mexico’s Prospera, for example, tied cash transfers to schooling and vaccinations, breaking cycles of intergenerational poverty. India’s challenge is not one of awareness but of political will. The tools to measure poverty have evolved. What remains missing is the intent to translate these insights into coherent, coordinated policy.