Poverty index: how Jharkhand reduced its poor the fastest

Jharkhand reduced the incidence of multidimensional poverty from 74.9 per cent to 46.5 per cent between 2005-06 and 2015-16

Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh together accounted for 196 million MPI poor people — more than half of all multidimensionally poor in India. (Representational Image)

LAST WEEK, the UN Development Programme and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative released the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) report for 2019, which found that Jharkhand has made the fastest improvement among Indian states in reducing poverty (The Indian Express, July 13). Across India, the number of people living in multidimensional poverty has gone down from 690.55 million in 2005-06 to 369.55 million in 2015-16 — a reduction of 271 million people in a decade.