Even as India once more self-declares its “arrival on the world stage” with a symbol for the Indian rupee, a global assessment presents a depressing picture of India’s actual economic performance. In a study whose conclusions were to be expected, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHDI) has revealed that an appropriate index of poverty (and deprivation) finds its incidence in India and elsewhere to be much greater than estimated by the controversy-dogged measures of “income poverty” that abound.
Commissioned by the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme to evolve a multi-dimensional approach to and define a more appropriate index of poverty for inclusion in the 20th anniversary edition of its flagship Human Development Report, the OPHDI has recently completed its study that provides a new assessment of the level and distribution of global poverty.
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