New Delhi: It was the season for claims and tall claims. The 2024 Parliament elections were three months away. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was talking to a gathering in Uttar Pradesh’s Bulandshahr in January. “In the ten years of our government’s rule, 25 crore people — this is a big number — 25 crore people have been lifted out of poverty,” he said.

The number had been rigged by his government in a pre-planned manner to spruce up its image. 

This investigation by The Reporters’ Collective reveals how the dubious statistic was produced as a result of a discreet operation launched on the instructions of the Prime Minister’s office to counter select global rankings, such as the UN’s Multidimensional Poverty Index, in which the Indian government scores poorly. 

In the previous part of this series, we revealed how the government attempted to influence NGOs to alter key parameters of the Global Hunger Index to improve India’s ranking. This effort was spearheaded by a dedicated inter-ministerial unit called “Global Indices for Reform and Growth” (GIRG). The unit monitors global indices and engages with publishers to push for methodological changes that favor India’s rankings or orchestrates efforts to discredit the indices while promoting domestically crafted alternatives based on selective data.

The poverty reduction figure that Modi cited during his election campaign came out of one such index the government created, with the help of this unit called GIRG.

A senior advisor of Niti Aayog, government’s top think tank, is on record admitting that under instructions from the top,  the UN’s Multidimensional Poverty Index was one of the 30 indices that the government monitored and reviewed, and eventually countered with a self-serving alternative, because it showed India in “poor light”. 

International agencies rarely budge to bullying by governments in the developing world. So, the government had invented the game, with its own set of rules, where it was guaranteed to win.

In a “confidential” document, the officials noted that having a national version of a global multidimensional poverty index is necessary because, “National governments have complete ownership of this measure.” “The computation of a national MPI allows the freedom to choose dimensions and indicators, based on priorities, local contexts, and data availability.”

The same documents show the government had rigged the results of its poverty index long before even the framework for the new poverty index was finalised. The index on poverty was pre-ordained to show poverty is reducing because of government interventions.

Officials decided in 2020 that the index would produce the needed results - a pat on the back for Modi government. This decision had been taken three years prior to even the compilation of data that would go into making the index.

The data was eventually compiled and released in July 2023, in good time for the 2024 election campaign. Just as it had been decided internally, the report claimed government programmes were the reason behind the drop in poverty.

To whitewash the results and arrive at predetermined findings of lower poverty level, the government picked indicators that would reflect lower levels of poverty in India, and cut down the scores assigned to other indicators, such as child nutrition and health that could show high levels of poverty.

The result: India’s multidimensional poverty index showed substantially lower levels of poverty in the country than that seen in the global index.

Officials at the government’s think tank Niti Aayog further extrapolated the already rigged data and claimed 25 crore people had escaped poverty since 2013-14 when Narendra Modi came to power. They also claimed, based on these projections, that poverty levels would be in single digits by 2024-25.

Counting the Poor

To know how many people are poor, what needs to be defined first is poverty. India traditionally defined poverty by a threshold. Initially, it was defined as the minimum expenditure needed to consume a specific number of calories but was later decoupled from caloric requirements. Anyone who spent less than this minimum defined level was considered poor.

Poverty lines, or the minimum thresholds, have always been controversial for not being in line with lived realities. Under pressure, the Congress-led UPA government appointed a new committee to set a fresh poverty line for India. This committee submitted its recommendations in June 2014. However, the newly elected Modi government never officially accepted the new poverty line.

A task force formed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015 to recommend ways to battle poverty urged setting up a clear poverty line to tackle poverty. It did consider a multidimensional poverty index that measures poverty by looking beyond income. But they stated that a multidimensional index should support the poverty line, not replace it. But a decade later, the government has done what its own task force advised against.

With no poverty line, the government began making tall claims based solely on a multidimensional poverty index that it created.

Poverty across dimensions

Since 2010, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative has been releasing annual global poverty estimates using the Multidimensional Poverty Index. The United Nations Development Program later joined in on this exercise. Under this, poverty is not just measured in terms of the income or expenditure levels of an individual. It instead looks at three key dimensions in an individual's life – education, health, and living standards.

Performance on each of the three dimensions is tracked based on a total of 10 parameters – like “has a child died in the last five years?” or “does the household cook with dung?”

When an individual is found deprived across multiple parameters at the same time, they are considered multidimensionally poor.

In 2018, India was ranked 53 among 105 countries. Its rank stayed the same the following year when 101 countries were scored.

In February 2020, then cabinet secretary Rajiv Gauba initiated the “Global Indices for Reform and Growth” or GIRG exercise. Under this at least 19 ministries and departments were tasked with tracking a total of 30 indices. The indices covered a range of sectors – from the state of India’s democracy to the level of undernourishment in the country.

While the government publicly maintained that GIRG existed to keep a check on areas where India was not performing well and use parameters enlisted in indices to carry out reforms. However, internally, it was quite clear that the government was trying to whitewash any possible criticism of the country by these indices.  

The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index was one of the 30 indices government officials were now monitoring.

NITI Aayog was made responsible for monitoring the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and creating India’s own version. It partnered with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative for technical help. 

The Prime Minister’s Office suggested using data from the 75th round of household consumption survey for India called the National Sample Survey for the index. This was different from the global multidimensional poverty index, which uses National Family Health Survey data for India. The move was surprising because key NSS data hadn’t been published due to “data issues.”

The idea of using NSS data for the MPI didn’t work out. The National Statistical Office (NSO) raised concerns, pointing out that the NSS didn’t cover all multidimensional poverty index indicators. For example, it lacked data on child mortality and years of schooling. It also recommended excluding data from regions like Goa and most of Northeast India (except Assam) due to insufficient samples.

With the methodology undecided, Niti Aayog in August 2020 constituted a Multidimensional Poverty Index Coordination Committee, comprising officials from 13 different ministries or departments and one UNDP representative, that would meet once every month to track progress on creating India’s index.

Officials internally knew what result they would get before even building the index: “A comparison between NFHS 4 (2015/16) and NFHS 5 (2019/21) would capture the remarkable progress brought about by focused interventions in the MPI parameter.”

It meant officials had to work towards rigging the poverty index parameters to surpass the global poverty index. 

In 2021, Niti Aayog published its first national multidimensional poverty index. It showed that 25.01% of India’s population was multidimensionally poor based on data from the 2015-16 NFHS survey. This was nearly 3% lower than what the global multidimensional poverty index said for the same year.

Although both indices relied on the same National Family Health Survey to measure poverty, the key difference was in the parameters. India had 12 parameters while the global one had 10.

The national multidimensional poverty index added “maternal health” as a parameter to the “Health” indicator. While maternal health is an important parameter to track, the government tweaked the weightage within the “Health” dimension. With the inclusion of a third parameter, both “nutrition” and “child mortality” saw a reduction in their weightage for the overall score. Nutrition is an indicator where India has fared poorly with high levels of stunting and wasting.

But that wasn’t all.

The government added a new parameter to the “standard of living” dimension as well. Under this if even a single member of a household has a bank account or a post office account, they would not be considered deprived. According to NFHS data, over 90% of India has a bank account. While that is a remarkable feat for a developing nation, the parameter itself is one that a vast majority of Indians would score well in.

Besides, the addition of another parameter to the “standard of living” dimension meant that the rest of the parameters too see a reduction in their weightage.

Niti Aayog was quite candid about the advantage of creating a homemade index with handpicked parameters. In its internal note, the Aayog noted: “The computation of a national MPI allows the freedom to choose dimensions and indicators, based on priorities, local contexts, and data availability. National governments have complete ownership over this measure.”

The first national multidimensional poverty index did its job. According to experts, it underestimated India's poor by 3.7 crore compared to the global index. The government will now use it as a baseline for future measures.

The second national poverty index report was released in July 2023. This one, titled “A Progress Report”, showed what Niti Aayog officials had predicted three years ago in June 2020 itself: poverty is reducing.

The 2023 index was based on the National Family Health Survey conducted in 2019 and 2021. Once again, the total multidimensional poverty under the India index was lower than the one by the global index. This time by nearly 1.5%.

The government compared the two national indices to claim 13.5 crore people had escaped poverty between 2015-16 and 2019/21. However, independent economists were quick to point out that the government had used the same population estimates for both years. So while more people may have been lifted out of poverty, the number was exaggerated by 1.7 crore since growth in overall population, half a decade apart, had not been accounted for.

The government then went one step further.

In January 2024, Niti Aayog released a paper claiming that 24.9 crore people were lifted out of poverty between 2013-14 and 2022-23—the period when Modi was in power. It did so by projecting NHFS data available for two years to a decade, of which eight years had no surveys.

Unsurprisingly, the indicator that showed the maximum improvement in the decade was “bank accounts”. While over 58% Indians did not have a bank account in 2013-14, the percentage came down to 3.69%. The Modi government’s Jan Dhan Yojana is widely believed to be responsible for this spike in bank account creations.

With this indicator in the mix, it became easier for the government to claim 25 crore people were out of poverty.

But the self-adulation breached into absurdity. Aayog officials attributed this “achievement” to government interventions. Among the key ones highlighted was the Anaemia Mukt Bharat Mission. The officials did so despite the fact that anemia is not being tracked by the multidimensional poverty index at all.

The government’s alacrity and interest on this index was in stark contrast to its marked indifference towards another crucial one. Even though it is a defining feature of independent India. More on this in the series finale.

This is the second part of our investigative series: The Ministry of Truth. 

You can read the previous part here.