The report ‘Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2021: Unmasking Disparities By Ethnicity, Caste and Gender’ released on Thursday has found that 1.3 billion people across 109 countries, “live in acute multidimensional poverty”. Multidimensional poverty index complements the measure of monetary poverty by including three broad dimensions: health, education, living standards. Within these dimensions are further subdivisions, each corresponding to an SDG goal. 

In the context of India, the global MPI can be disaggregated in terms of “291 ethno-racial categories and five caste categories”. The report finds that “In India five out of six multidimensionally poor people are from lower tribes or castes. The Scheduled Tribe group accounts for 9.4 percent of the population and is the poorest, with 65 million of the 129 million people living in multidimensional poverty”.