POLITICALLY, poverty has been a sensitive issue in Pakistan, as it has been in many other developing countries. It is no surprise that governments try to avoid counting the number of poor to protect themselves from such an exercise’s possible political fallout. When they do, they use methods that tend to mitigate the actual incidence of poverty rather than bring out a true picture about the level of deprivation experienced by the people. Therefore, when the government under Pervez Musharraf conducted a survey in the mid-2000s to show to the world that its economic policies had cut the number of poor, many global organisations like the World Bank immediately raised questions about the efficacy of the methodology used to arrive at that conclusion. The previous PPP-led government did not even bother to undertake such an exercise, fearing the figures would show a hefty increase in the numbers living below the poverty line owing to the economic slowdown.

Regularly updated data on the poor are crucial to framing economic policies, allocating fiscal resources and undertaking initiatives to target poverty in an integrated and comprehensive manner. Now the Nawaz Sharif government has launched the Multi-dimensional Poverty Index, based on the globally recognised methodology and developed by the Oxford Poverty and the Human Development Initiative, for measuring the incidence of poverty. The index is being released by the UNDP’s human development reports since 2010. It is also being used by dozens of other countries and is said to have helped some such as Nepal lift a significant number of people out of poverty by ‘building a deprivation profile’. The MPI will calculate poverty on the basis of multidimensional deprivations — such as healthcare, education, water supply, income, etc — and highlight the real situation and intensity of the deprivation being suffered by the people at the national, provincial and district levels. This kind of data should give policymakers sufficient knowledge about the actual status of deprivation that is the lot of different regions and help them formulate policies and allocate funds according to the needs of the people. It is hoped that the MPI data will actually be used to pull millions out of the poverty trap and not just kept to fill official files.