Bengal fares better than Guj in reducing multi-dimensional poverty: Report

Kolkata: Despite Gujarat’s per capita income of a person in a specified year being twice that of West Bengal, the latter has done a better job in reducing multidimensional poverty than Gujarat over the past five years, suggests the latest NITI Aayog report according to an English news portal.

In 2016, about 18.5 per cent of people in Gujarat and 21.3 per cent in Bengal lived under multidimensional poverty. However, by 2021, in Bengal, it dropped by 9.4 percentage points and reached 11.9 per cent. In case of Gujarat, it dropped to 11.7 percent, only by 6.8 percentage points.

An in-depth analysis reveals that one in every 11 persons escaped poverty in Bengal during this period while in Gujarat, only one in every 15 persons could do the same.

Hence from 2016 to 2021, West Bengal brought 92.58 lakh people out of poverty, whereas the number for Gujarat was 47.84 lakh in the same period.

The report titled ‘National Multidimensional Poverty Index: A Progress of Review 2023′ shows that in West Bengal, 11.89 per cent of the population lives in multidimensional poverty while in Gujarat the figure is more or less the same at 11.66 per cent.

West Bengal has outperformed Gujarat in reducing deprivation in nine out of the 12 indicators of the multidimensional poverty index that assesses deprivation along 12 indicators falling under broader categories of health, education, and standard of living.

For instance, in nutrition, in 2016, approximately 33.6 per cent of families in Bengal and 41.37 per cent in Gujarat had at least one member facing undernourishment. These numbers dropped by 14 percent and stood at 27.3 percent in Bengal by 2021, and a little over 3 percent to 38.09 per cent in Gujarat.

In sanitation, Bengal registered a 16 percentage point decrease from 47.81 per cent to 32 percent in between 2016 and 2021 while for Gujarat it declined from 37 per cent to 26 per cent between 2016 and 2021 — an 11 percentage point decrease.

According to the report, about 7.7 per cent of people in Gujarat and 9.46 per cent in Bengal were deprived of clean drinking water in 2016. By 2021, this was 5.3 per cent in Gujarat and only 4.97 per cent in Bengal.

By 2021, the poverty intensity in Gujarat reduced to 43.25 per cent, and in West Bengal, it decreased even further to 42.35 per cent.

The report measures poverty not by the standard metric of income, but in terms of deprivation on the parameters of health, education, and standard of living, which are further divided into a total of 12 sub-indicators.

The three indicators on which Gujarat performed better than Bengal were housing, cooking fuel, and electricity.