Who Are The Poor Of India?
By: Anish Malpani
Tags: Social Justice, Poverty, Social Enterprise, India, Data

Ever since I quit the corporate world, the story I have been telling myself is that I want to work on uplifting the poorest.

I am data-man, or so I would like to think. So, it is essential for me to understand the size and depth of this problem of poverty. And how do you even define poverty? Let alone quantify it?

Over the past three years, I believe I have earned a decent understanding of it. This is an attempt at formalizing that understanding.

First, what is poverty?

Believe it or not, this isn’t straightforward. There are four different ways to look at it:

Absolute Poverty : This draws an income line across the world and everyone under it is poor and everyone above it is not poor. There are different lines, the most popular being the “extreme poverty” line which is $1.90 / day adjusted for purchasing power parity. Which basically means let’s keep things apples to apples, not apples to moons. Pros and cons here and you can think about that all day.

: This draws an income line across the world and everyone under it is poor and everyone above it is not poor. There are different lines, the most popular being the “extreme poverty” line which is $1.90 / day adjusted for purchasing power parity. Which basically means let’s keep things apples to apples, not apples to moons. Pros and cons here and you can think about that all day. Relative Poverty : This arranges people within a certain population according to income, and those that fall in the bottom tranche are considered poor. A good way of understanding this is that while there is no absolute extreme poverty in the U.S., there’s a ton of relative poverty. Relative poverty will almost always exist. Absolute poverty doesn’t need to.

: This arranges people within a certain population according to income, and those that fall in the bottom tranche are considered poor. A good way of understanding this is that while there is no absolute extreme poverty in the U.S., there’s a ton of relative poverty. Relative poverty will almost always exist. Absolute poverty doesn’t need to. Multidimensional Poverty : This is my preferred definition. It is based on the tenet that poverty is more than just a lack of money — it is a lack of access to healthcare, education and a decent standard of living. It just falls short of including dignity, but dignity is something even the Gods won’t be able to quantify. Intuitively, this increases the total number of poor because it increases that basic standard we aspire to for humanity.

: This is my preferred definition. It is based on the tenet that poverty is more than just a lack of money — it is a lack of access to healthcare, education and a decent standard of living. It just falls short of including dignity, but dignity is something even the Gods won’t be able to quantify. Intuitively, this increases the total number of poor because it increases that basic standard we aspire to for humanity. Hunger: If you’re absolutely poor, you’re probably hungry. So, sometimes, looking at the hunger index is also a good way of gauging pain. Sounds morbid, but it is easier to quantify.

And these definitions are just skimming the surface of the ocean that is measuring injustice. There are also recall methods, survey nuances, time-sensitivity issues, and other permutations that give data-abusers enough ammo to craft any story that fits their narrative.

I’m going to avoid doing that.

Okay enough jargon, so how many people in India are poor then?

You guessed right; there are many different estimates for this as well. But I promise I’ll end this section with somewhat of a reasonable number for us to anchor to.

Meanwhile, here is a bunch of poverty estimates for India that you’ll see flying around in the public:

It’s important to consider what the numbers were during the survey year because that’s when data is (or should be) the cleanest. Estimates based off that add more assumptions to an assumption-laden world, which only contaminates the truth.

For instance, I don’t fully believe World Poverty Clock’s assumption that India has only 40 million extremely poor people right now. Either way, I don’t think looking at extreme poverty is the best way of looking at a specific country’s poverty — it’s singular, and poverty is not singular. So, let’s drop that and progress.

Multidimensional poverty on the other hand, is hands-down the best way to look at poverty based on what’s out there. It was developed by Oxford University in 2010 so there’s some credibility for you. This metric is hard to calculate but not impossible. Enter UNDP. They have been nice enough to calculate and aggregate this for us.

Ahh, I’m finally getting to the point.

In India, in 2017, 28% or 374 million were multidimensionally poor. I did my own math from an incredible human development dataset from 2012 using a similar thought process, and my estimate was ~34% for back then. So, taking all that into consideration, and the fact that India has been growing economically (at least pre-COVID), I think it is fair to assume that today, India has a multidimensional poverty rate of 20%-25%. Extrapolating that to current population estimates (2020), that’s somewhere between 274 million and 342 million people.

To make it a little easier, let’s settle for a number somewhere in the middle which conveniently comes to 300 million people that makes up ~22% of India’s population.

There, as I promised, a reasonable number we can anchor ourselves to.

Fine, so who are the poor?

It’s now time to get to the meat of things. If you’re familiar with the social impact space, none of the above should have been bombastically revealing. The following though? Maybe.

The question that was grappling my mind (and my heart) is who exactly are the poor? And not just from a meta, philosophical perspective, but from an actionable, data-driven perspective.

Farmers, construction workers, waste-pickers, Dalits — that’s what comes to mind right off the bat, but how many of them? By how much? Who else? From what perspective are they poor — health, education, income? And what about security guards and dhobis and coolies? Are they poor? Not all of them, obviously, but how many?

So yes, if work is the center of sustenance of life, I was curious what type of workers fell under the landscape of the poor in India.

I happened upon an incredible human development survey from 2012 that had data at an individual and a household level for over 40,000 households and over 200,000 individuals. It was representative and has been used by many impact strongholds including the International Labour Organization as recently as 2018. Credibility.

I isolated the 50,000 individuals who were mostly working, cleaned up some of the occupation data, mapped it, calculated a reasonable version of multidimensional poverty based on the data that was available, and voila! Here is how I answered those grappling questions of the head (and the heart).