Professor Utsa Patnaik, Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University, on Tuesday said the Government of India’s tall claim in July of substantial decline in poverty in India was possible only because there was a switch to a completely different index called ‘Multi-dimensional Poverty Index’ (MDI), which had no reference to nutrition.
Prof. Patnaik was awarded the Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for 2023, instituted by the Malcolm and Elizabeth Adiseshiah Trust.
Delivering the Malcolm Adiseshiah Memorial Lecture ‘To Overcome Poverty, First Let Us Measure It Honestly’, at Asian College of Journalism in Taramani, she said with the application of MDI, which was a weighted average of various civic amenities, such as housing with non-thatched roofing, piped water, and toilets, a household had access to, it would seem like there were ‘no poor persons at all in the industrial North’.
“Every condition of physical access to civic amenities entering into the index would be automatically satisfied, whether every family has the money to actually meet its rent and other utility bills is disregarded,” she said.
Prof. Patnaik argued that MDI did not show that poverty was a ‘relational phenomenon’. “The recent official claim that 450 million Indians had been ‘lifted out of poverty’ between 2004 and 2019 is spurious and is an outcome of changing the very definition of poverty,” she said.
The claim about substantial reduction in poverty, Prof. Pantaik said, was a result of ‘cumulative underestimation of the poverty line decade after decade, by delinking it from the necessity of satisfying any nutrition norm whatsoever’.
Dipa Sinha, assistant professor of economics, Ambedkar University, who received the Elizabeth Adiseshiah Citation, said the multiple editorials written recently by economists in senior positions in the Government of India argued that the standards used to measure ‘undernutrition in the country were wrong because they were global standards and that Indians were genetically predetermined to not be as tall’.
“It is an easy way to wish away the problem It is about addressing structural inequalities about people’s livelihoods, sanitation, access to health and women’s empowerment. If you do all this, and the deficient environment is improved, then heights are a very good marker of what development is. But we are happily diverting attention away from the problem by just arguing that this is all genetics,” she said.
