A proper definition for poverty has long proved elusive. The tendency has been to use measures of income, but this places the emphasis on the cash economy and ignores issues such as housing and access to safe drinking water. The new study employed a ‘multidimensional poverty index’ developed by researchers at the University of Oxford that used ten major variables, including schooling, nutrition, sanitation and access to good cooking fuel.

The researchers compiled the index using data from 104 countries with a combined population of 5.2 billion people. They found that about a third – around 1.7 billion – lived in multidimensional poverty, which is 400 million more than the World Bank’s estimate for the number of people living in ‘extreme’ poverty.

The index helps to determine which ‘dimensions’ of poverty are more important in a given region – for example in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it’s access to schooling, while in Madhya Pradesh in India, it’s malnutrition. It also allows regional differences to be identified: in the rural Indian state of Bihar, the rate is more than 80 per cent, while in Kerala, it’s only about 15 per cent.

In total, India has some 410 million people living in poverty, the study found, suggesting that the distribution of wealth generated by the country’s rapid economic growth is extremely unequal.

September 2010