Exploring the Dimensions of Poverty in India: Regional, Social, and Human Development

Poverty in India is rarely just about empty wallets. It shows up in the schools children cannot attend, in the hospitals far from villages, in the kitchens without clean cooking fuel, and in the wages a Dalit woman earns compared to her upper-caste neighbour. To understand it properly, you have to look at poverty from several angles at once – where people live, which social group they belong to, and what kind of human development opportunities they have access to. These three dimensions overlap and reinforce each other in ways that make poverty deeply persistent for some communities and surprisingly easy to escape for others.

Why a multidimensional view of poverty matters 🔗

For decades, poverty in India was measured almost entirely through income or consumption expenditure. If you could afford a basket of food and basic goods, you were not poor. But this approach hides as much as it reveals. A family in rural Jharkhand may technically cross the income threshold and still have no toilet, no electricity, no school within walking distance, and an anaemic mother who has never seen a doctor.

To capture this fuller picture, NITI Aayog’s National Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) measures deprivation across three equally weighted dimensions – health, education, and standard of living – using twelve indicators that range from nutrition and child mortality to housing, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, cooking fuel, and bank accounts. According to its 2023 progress review, the share of India’s population that is multidimensionally poor fell from 24.85% in 2015-16 to 14.96% in 2019-21, with around 13.5 crore people escaping poverty during this period. This shift in measurement matters because it forces policymakers to look at poverty as a web of overlapping deprivations rather than a single number.

The regional dimension: a tale of unequal states 🔗

Poverty in India is not spread evenly. It clusters in specific states, specific districts, and specific pockets within districts. The 2023 MPI report showed that Bihar, with 33.76% of its population multidimensionally poor, had the highest poverty rate in the country, followed by Jharkhand at 28.81%. At the other end of the spectrum, Kerala had a multidimensional poverty rate of just 0.55% – the lowest among all states and union territories.

This regional divide is not a recent accident. It reflects decades of differences in governance, social investment, land reform, agricultural growth, and industrialisation. Six states – Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, and West Bengal – historically accounted for a disproportionate share of India’s multidimensional poor, despite having less than half the population.

Kerala: development beyond income 🔗

Kerala’s story is often called the “Kerala Model” because the state achieved high human development outcomes despite having a relatively modest per capita income for most of its history. The model rests on several pillars: early and aggressive land reforms, near-universal public education, a strong primary healthcare system, decentralised local governance, women’s collectives like Kudumbashree, and an active public distribution system.

The results are striking. Kerala’s literacy rate is around 96%, its infant mortality rate is among the lowest in India, and its life expectancy is comparable to that of many high-income countries. On November 1, 2025, the state announced that it had effectively eradicated extreme poverty through its Extreme Poverty Eradication Programme, which identified families using four key deprivation indicators – food, healthcare, livelihood, and secure housing – rather than relying on self-enrolment alone. The lesson is clear: when a state invests in people first and lets growth follow, poverty becomes a solvable problem rather than a permanent feature.

Bihar: the weight of structural disadvantage 🔗

Bihar is, in many ways, the mirror image of Kerala. The state has the country’s lowest per capita income, heavy dependence on agriculture, limited industrialisation, and large-scale outmigration of workers to other states. According to Census 2011 data, Bihar’s literacy rate was 61.8%, with female literacy at just 51.5% – well below the national average. The NITI Aayog SDG India Index for 2023-24 placed Bihar at the bottom across states and union territories.

It would be unfair to suggest Bihar has not progressed. In fact, the state recorded the fastest absolute reduction in multidimensional poverty between 2015-16 and 2019-21, with the proportion of poor falling by more than 18 percentage points. But the gap with better-performing states remains enormous because the starting point was so low and the structural barriers – caste hierarchies, weak public health infrastructure, agrarian dependence, and recurrent floods – are difficult to dismantle quickly.

The social dimension: caste, tribe, and gender 🔗

The second dimension of poverty in India is social. Who you are born as – your caste, tribe, religion, and gender – strongly predicts whether you will experience poverty. This is not because of any inherent quality of these communities, but because of centuries of exclusion from land, education, dignified work, and decision-making power.

Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes 🔗

The numbers are sobering. Roughly five out of every six multidimensionally poor people in India belong to a Scheduled Tribe (ST) or a Scheduled Caste (SC), according to the Global MPI 2021 report by UNDP and OPHI. Of the estimated 129 million people belonging to Scheduled Tribes, about 50.6% live in multidimensional poverty. Among the 283 million Scheduled Caste population, around 33.3% are multidimensionally poor.

A caste-based analysis of multidimensional poverty published in PLOS ONE confirms that STs are the most disadvantaged subgroup, contributing nearly twice their population share to total poverty, followed by SCs, OBCs, and finally the “Others” category. Tribes are often poor because they live in geographically remote forested and hilly areas with thin infrastructure, while Scheduled Castes face poverty largely through occupational segregation, landlessness, and continuing social discrimination.

The gender dimension 🔗

Women in India experience poverty differently from men, even within the same household. Daughters often eat less, study for fewer years, marry earlier, and inherit less than their brothers. The International Labour Organization has estimated that Indian women earn 20-30% less than men for comparable work, and Scheduled Caste women earn only about 55% of what women from other castes earn – a clear example of caste and gender disadvantage compounding each other.

This double burden falls hardest on Dalit and Adivasi women. They face wage discrimination, restricted access to land and credit, higher exposure to unsafe casual labour, and weaker political representation at higher levels of governance. The NITI Aayog MPI also confirms that females have a higher multidimensional poverty rate than males, especially in rural areas. Reducing poverty in India is therefore impossible without specifically addressing the deprivations faced by women from marginalised communities.

The human development dimension: education, health, and income 🔗

The third lens through which poverty must be viewed is the human development lens, an approach championed by economists like Amartya Sen. The argument is simple but powerful: real development is the expansion of people’s capabilities – what they are able to do and be – not just the rise of their incomes. From this perspective, poverty is the deprivation of basic capabilities, such as being well-nourished, being literate, and being able to participate in community life.

Education 🔗

Education is one of the most reliable routes out of poverty. A child who completes secondary school is far more likely to find decent work, delay marriage, have fewer and healthier children, and earn higher wages over a lifetime. Conversely, low schooling traps families in low-productivity work across generations. In Bihar, low female literacy correlates strongly with high malnutrition, low contraceptive use, and weak intergenerational mobility. Kerala’s near-universal literacy did the opposite – it produced a workforce that could migrate, negotiate, and demand better services.

Health and nutrition 🔗

Health is both a cause and a consequence of poverty. Malnourished children grow into less productive adults; unexpected illness can wipe out a poor family’s savings overnight. The NITI Aayog MPI includes nutrition, child and adolescent mortality, maternal health, and antenatal care as health indicators because deprivations in these areas signal deep structural problems. Out-of-pocket spending on healthcare remains one of the biggest drivers of impoverishment in India, pushing crores of families below the poverty line every year when a serious illness strikes.

Income and standard of living 🔗

Income still matters, but the MPI captures it indirectly through the standard of living dimension – cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, assets, and bank accounts. Programmes like Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana for clean cooking gas, the Swachh Bharat Mission for toilets, Jal Jeevan Mission for tap water, and Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana for housing have visibly improved these indicators in the last decade. These are not luxuries; they are the foundations on which education, health, and earning capacity rest.

How the three dimensions interact 🔗

The most important thing to understand is that these dimensions never operate in isolation. A Dalit woman born in rural Bihar faces a regional disadvantage (poorly governed state), a social disadvantage (caste and gender), and a human development disadvantage (weak schools and clinics) all at once. Each layer reinforces the others. Limited schooling reduces her bargaining power in the labour market, poor health reduces her ability to work, and low income keeps her children out of better schools.

This is why piecemeal policies rarely work. Lifting a family out of multidimensional poverty requires simultaneous action on multiple fronts – investing in girls’ education, ensuring functioning primary health centres, securing land rights, providing social security, and strengthening local governance. Kerala’s success is not because of any single magic policy; it is because the state did many things together, sustained over decades.

What do you think? If you had to choose one of the three dimensions – regional, social, or human development – to prioritise for India’s next phase of poverty reduction, which would you pick, and why? And do you think Kerala’s model can realistically be replicated in states like Bihar, or does it depend on specific historical conditions that cannot be reproduced?

References

1. https://www.niti.gov.in/sites/default/files/2023-08/India-National-Multidimentional-Poverty-Index-2023.pdf
2. https://www.undp.org/india/national-multidimensional-poverty-index-progress-review-2023
3. https://www.shankariasparliament.com/current-affairs/eradication-of-extreme-poverty-the-kerala-model
4. https://www.outlookindia.com/elections/why-bihar-remains-poor-data-behind-indias-most-persistent-development-gap
5. https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/library/resource/global-multidimensional-poverty-index-2021-unmasking-disparities-by-ethnicity-caste-and-gender/
6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9337695/
7. https://borgenproject.org/indias-gender-gap/