Amidst acute poverty across South Asia, the five states of Delhi, Kerala, Goa, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh have the least number of poor people in India, according to a new measure of global poverty developed at the University of Oxford for the UNDP. The new measure, called the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), has been developed
and applied by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI).
It will be featured in the forthcoming 20th anniversary edition of the UN Development Programme Human Development Report. A detailed analysis using the MPI reveals that South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa have comparable intensities of poverty, according to an OPHI working paper titled Acute Multidimensional Poverty: A New Index for Developing Countries.
In terms of human lives, South Asia has the world’s highest levels of poverty.
Fifty-one per cent of the population of Pakistan is MPI poor, 58 per cent in Bangladesh, 55 per cent in India, and 65 per cent in Nepal.
The analysis states: “We find that Delhi has an MPI equivalent to Iraq (45), whereas Bihar’s MPI is similar to Guinea (8th poorest country) in the ranking).
—PTI