India has staggering 31% of World's poor children



   About 31% of the world’s “multi-dimensionally poor” children live in India, according to a new report by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), a poverty reduction project grounded in economist Amartya Sen’s ‘capability approach’.

  “In terms of countries, fully 31% of the 689 million poor children live in India, followed by Nigeria (8%), Ethiopia (7%) and Pakistan (6%),” noted the survey, titled ‘Global Multidimensional Poverty Index [MPI], 2017’. OPHI is an economic research centre at the Oxford University, led by Professor Sabina Alkire, and the study is based on a survey conducted among 103 countries.

10 indicators

A “multi-dimensionally poor” child lacks at least a third of ten indicators, grouped into three dimensions of poverty: health, education and standard of living.
The health dimension comprises of indicators such as nutrition, child mortality, and education.
Under the standard of living are indicators such as access to cooking fuel, improved sanitation, safe drinking water and electricity. 

In terms of the number of such multi-dimensionally poor children as a proportion of the total population, India stood 37th among 103 countries.

Out of India’s 21.7 crore children, 49.9% were multi-dimensionally poor. However, the survey pointed out that the data for many countries based on Human Development Surveys were “somewhat outdated”.

In terms of absolute numbers, India accounts for both the highest and a staggering number of multi-dimensionally poor people. Sadly, more than 52.8 crore Indians are poor, which is more people than all the poor people living in Sub-Saharan Africa combined.

Of the 145 crore people (from the 103 countries) who are multi-dimensionally poor, 48% are children. That is a total of 68.9 crore children, 87% of such children live in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.


In Ethiopia, Niger, and South Sudan, over 90% of the children are MPI poor. The findings are deeply disturbing. This is a wake-up call to the international community which has adopted the global Sustainable Development Goals and takes seriously the Goal 1, the eradication of poverty in all its forms and dimensions.

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