The Union government’s claim that the number of people living in poverty has significantly reduced in recent years based on multidimensional poverty index (MPI) is highly questionable, political economist Parakala Prabhakar said here on Saturday.
During an interaction with N. Ram, Director, THG Publishing Private Ltd., organised by the Dravidian Professionals Forum, on his new book — The Crooked Timber of New India - Essays on a Republic in Crisis — he said that he saw a “sleight of hand” in the government’s projection of data, based on the MPI.
He referred to the latest report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which said that 41.5 crore people moved out of multidimensional poverty between 2005-2006 and 2019-2021. The NITI Aayog recently released a report based on the national MPI, stating that 13.5 crore people moved out of multidimensional poverty between 2015-16 and 2019-21.
Mr. Prabhakhar said that the MPI was introduced as rise in income alone cannot measure other dimensions of poverty such as access to healthcare, sanitation and transport. While the MPI should be seen in addition to data on income-level, he said the government was silent on income data.
When the country’s economy had not even gone back to the pre-pandemic level, how can the government claim that such a large number of people had escaped poverty, he questioned.
He told The Hindu, after the discussion, that one could not verify the claims of NITI Aayog as the government had failed to provide access to authentic and unimpeachable data on many indicators.
He said that while Prime Minister Narendra Modi kept count of the number of times the Opposition had verbally abused him, the Ministers of the Union government were repeatedly telling Parliament that the government did not have data on important parameters.
He reiterated the argument made in his book that the present government was “staggeringly incompetent”, when it came to economic policies.
Criticising the government for the degrading secular, liberal, plural and democratic credentials of the country, he said that even if the present dispensation was defeated in the 2024 general election, at least a decade-and-half of hard work was needed to see that the ’poison’ injected now in the country was completely excised.
‘Struck by clarity’
Mr. Ram, in his introductory remarks, said that he was struck by the clarity of the essays that constituted the book. Most of the major issues that have come to the fore had been dealt with and analysed with clarity and an exposition that was extremely accessible.
