HT Correspondent letters@hindustantimes.com NEW DELHI: A quarter of India’s population is still poor, accord- ing to the first National Multidi- mensional Poverty Index (MPI) released by the NITI Aayog on Thursday, but the situation has improved since, officials said. Bihar has the highest propor- tion of people who are poor (51.91%), followed by Jharkhand (42.16%), Uttar Pradesh (37.79%) and Madhya Pradesh (36.65%), the index showed. Kerala, Goa, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu and Punjab have registered the lowest pov- erty rate among all states. On Saturday, the NITI Aayog officials said that the index is based on the National Health Family Survey for 2015-16 (NFHS-4) data and preliminary findings from the NFHS-5 sug- gests improvement in some of the key indicators of the index. India ranks 66 out of 109 countries in the Global MPI 2021. The national MPI 2021 has been developed by NITI Aayog in consultation with 12 ministries and in partnership with state governments and index publish- | Ing agencies — Oxford Univer- sity's Oxford Poverty and | Human Development Initiative, 25% of India’s population still poor, says Niti Aayog and United Nations Develop- ment Programme. The national MPI-2021 is a measure to define poverty based on assessment of three parameters — health, edu- cation and standard of living — on 12 indicators such as nutri- tion, years of schooling, access to cooking fuel, sanitation, drink- ing water, electricity, etc. Bihar has the highest number of malnourished people, while Uttar Pradesh topped the list of state and Union territories in child and adolescent mortality, the index showed. NFHS-4 data has been used to derive an idea of baseline multidimensional poverty to know the situation on ground before the full rollout of various central schemes, the NITI Aayog official said. “NFHS-4 precedes the full roll out of (central government's) flagship schemes on housing, drinking water, sanitation, elec- tricity, cooking fuel, financial inclusion, and other major efforts towards improving school attendance, nutrition, mother and child health, etc. Hence, it serves as a useful source for measuring the situa- | tion at baseline, that is, before large-scale roll out of nationally important schemes,” NITI Aayog said in a statement on Saturday. i ] iWhat NFHS-5 . results reveal India is undergoing a demographic transition. Italso faces several developmental challenges hhe findings of the fifth National Family and Health Survey (NFHS) — it was conducted between 2019 and 2021 — ought to be treated as an important turning point for policy- «making in India. Sure, NFHS is a sample survey and we should wait for the (delayed) 2021 Census numb- ers to authenticate sonie of the findings. But policy reckoning and recalibration need not be delayed. First, the firsts — India’s total fertility rate falling below replacement levels and women exceeding men in the population. When read with the fact that the share of the under-15 population has fallen in the last decade-and-a-half, the biggest policy challenge is not improving literacy or controlling the population. Ithas to be generation of sustainable remunerative employment, including for women. To be sure, the headline gender ratio should not blind us to the problems of entrenched patriarchy, which promotes son-preference through various illegal means. This is reflected in the fact that the gender ratio for children under five years is still 929 girls per 1,000 boys. This is as much a case for social intervention as an economic or health-based one. Then there is the question of India’s food security challenge. Under-nutrition, broadly speaking, conti- nues to decline. But complacency can be costly here. One, the progress of decline in under-nutrition has slowed. This must be read with the fact that economic growth slowed between NFHS-4 (2015-16) and NFHS-5 (2019-20). That the government has repeatedly extended the post-pandemic provision of free ration to 800 million people — even if for polit- ical considerations — underlines the precarity of the food security situation in India. The other important insight to be drawn is the ability of limited financial help to achieve behavioural change, which entails an economic cost. Both the Swachh Bharat Mission and the Ujjwala Yojna seem to have achieved remarkable Progress in their goals, namely, healthy sanitation and use of clean fuel for cooking. But the data shows that actual achievements are significantly lower than the claims made by the government. This has an important policy lesson. In certain things, there is no substitute for the fruits of a high GDP growth rate. Last but not least is the growing regional divide in India. The southern states have much better socio- economic and health indicators than their counter- parts in north and central India. The former will also see an increasingly falling share in the population, If and when the delimitation happens, this can reduce their political representation in the legislature, It will hardly be a smooth transition,