The country's first Multidimensional Poverty Index (Multidimensional Poverty Index-MPI) has been released by NITI Aayog.
As per the index, 51.91 per cent population of Bihar is poor, followed 42.16 per cent in Jharkhand, 37.79 per cent in Uttar Pradesh. While Madhya Pradesh (36.65 per cent) has been placed fourth in the index, Meghalaya (32.67 per cent) is at the fifth spot.
Kerala (0.71 per cent), Goa (3.76 per cent), Sikkim (3.82 per cent), Tamil Nadu (4.89 per cent) and Punjab (5.59 per cent) have registered the lowest poverty across India and are at the bottom of the index.
Bihar also ranks at the top in the list of states with houses having no electricity connection. Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Jharkhand and Odisha are the other top four states in the list.
The report said, India's MPI has three equally weighted dimensions, health, education and standard of living - which are represented by 12 indicators namely nutrition, child and adolescent mortality, antenatal care, years of schooling, school attendance, cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, assets and bank accounts.
Niti Aayog Vice Chairman Rajiv Kumar in his foreword said, "The development of the National Multidimensional Poverty Index of India is an important contribution towards instituting a public policy tool which monitors multidimensional poverty, informs evidence-based and focused interventions, thereby ensuring that no one is left behind."
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Under the sustainable development goals, India aims to reduce “at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions”.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) framework, adopted by 193 countries in 2015, has redefined development policies, government priorities, and metrics for measuring development progress across the world.
The Sustainable Development Goals framework, with 17 global goals and 169 targets, is significantly wider in scope and scale relative to the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), its predecessor.