UPPSC 2024 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 50 of 150

Correct — D, 3 and 4: the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the United Nations Development Programme. The global MPI is a joint product. OPHI, a research centre at the University of Oxford, supplies the methodology and the computation — it was the home of the Alkire–Foster method on which the index rests — while UNDP, through its Human Development Report Office, publishes it. The index first appeared in the Human Development Report 2010, replacing the Human Poverty Index that the HDR had introduced in 1997, and OPHI and UNDP have since issued the global MPI as a joint report. Both names therefore belong in the answer, and an option carrying only one of them is incomplete. Statement 1 is wrong because neither the World Bank nor the IMF is involved in the global MPI: the World Bank has its own, quite separate poverty apparatus built on an international poverty line measured in dollars a day at purchasing power parity — the line stood at $2.15 a day at 2017 PPP around the time of this exam, and the Bank has since revised both the line and its PPP base — while the IMF does not produce poverty measures at all. Statement 2 is a manufactured hybrid: it splices the first half of OPHI's name onto the World Health Organisation, which has no role in the MPI. Recognising that garbled name is the fastest route through this question, because it eliminates option (a) at once.

• (a)2 and 4 — Statement 2, 'Oxford Poverty and World Health Organisation (WHO)', is not the name of any body. It is a deliberately mangled version of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, with WHO substituted for the second half. WHO publishes health statistics and, with UNICEF, the Joint Monitoring Programme on water and sanitation, but it neither computes nor co-publishes the Multidimensional Poverty Index — even though health indicators such as nutrition and child mortality sit inside the index.
• (b)Only 4 — The most tempting wrong answer, and the reason the question is worth setting. UNDP does publish the global MPI, so the statement is not false — it is merely incomplete, because the index is produced jointly with OPHI and the question asks who prepares as well as who publishes. Press coverage routinely reports the MPI as a 'UNDP index', which is what makes candidates stop at option (b) instead of reading on to statement 3.
• (c)1 and 4 — The World Bank and the IMF have no part in the global MPI. The Bank's poverty work is monetary and consumption-based — an international poverty line expressed in PPP dollars a day, together with the Poverty, Prosperity and Planet series — and it is deliberately different in kind from the MPI, which uses no income or expenditure variable at all. The IMF's mandate is macroeconomic surveillance and lending, not poverty measurement. UPSC made the same point in 2012 by marking as false the claim that the MPI covers purchasing power parity or budget-deficit and GDP-growth variables.

The global Multidimensional Poverty Index measures poverty as a bundle of simultaneous deprivations at the household level rather than as a shortfall of income. It has three equally weighted dimensions — health, education and standard of living — unpacked into ten indicators: nutrition and child mortality for health; years of schooling and school attendance for education; and cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and assets for standard of living. A household is identified as MPI-poor if its weighted deprivation score reaches one-third, and the index itself is the product of two numbers, the incidence of poverty (the share of people who are poor) and its intensity (the average share of deprivations they suffer). This is the Alkire–Foster method, developed at OPHI by Sabina Alkire and James Foster.

Questions of the 'who publishes what' family are decided by keeping a clean mental table of institutions and their flagship publications, and this item hands you two shortcuts. The first is the fabricated name in statement 2 — once you see that 'Oxford Poverty and World Health Organisation' is not an organisation, option (a) disappears. The second is that statements 3 and 4 are both individually true, which rules out the single-name option (b) as incomplete. The deeper distinction the examiner is protecting is between monetary and non-monetary poverty measurement. The World Bank counts the poor by what they can spend; OPHI and UNDP count them by what they are deprived of. India carries a domestic version of the second approach as well — NITI Aayog's National MPI, whose baseline report appeared in 2021, keeps the same three dimensions but works with twelve indicators, adding maternal health and bank account to the global ten.

• The global MPI is prepared by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), University of Oxford, and published with the UNDP's Human Development Report Office; it first appeared in the Human Development Report 2010.
• It replaced the Human Poverty Index, which the UNDP's Human Development Report had introduced in 1997.
• Structure: 3 equally weighted dimensions (health, education, standard of living) and 10 indicators — nutrition, child mortality, years of schooling, school attendance, cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, assets. A household is MPI-poor when its weighted deprivation score reaches one-third.
• Method: the Alkire–Foster approach, developed at OPHI; MPI = incidence (H) × intensity (A). No income, expenditure or purchasing-power-parity variable enters the index.
• NITI Aayog's National MPI for India, first published as a baseline report in 2021, keeps the same three dimensions but uses twelve indicators, adding maternal health and bank account.
• The World Bank's poverty measurement is separate and monetary — an international poverty line in PPP dollars a day (US$2.15 at 2017 PPP around the time of this exam, since revised) — and the IMF does not measure poverty at all.

• Stopping at 'UNDP'. The global MPI is a joint OPHI–UNDP product; an option naming only one of the two is incomplete rather than false, which is exactly the discrimination this question demands.
• Letting the health indicators pull WHO into the answer. Nutrition and child mortality are MPI indicators, but WHO neither computes nor publishes the index.
• Confusing the global MPI with NITI Aayog's National MPI — same three dimensions, but ten indicators against twelve, and different publishers.
• Assuming a poverty index must contain an income or PPP variable. The MPI contains none; UPSC tested precisely this in 2012.

UPPSC asks the institutional question — who publishes the index, in which year one index replaced another, what the dimensions are — while UPSC prefers to test the content of the index, most sharply by offering macroeconomic variables such as PPP or GDP growth as false inclusions.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following is NOT a dimension of the global Multidimensional Poverty Index?

  • (a)Health
  • (b)Education
  • (c)Standard of living
  • (d)Per capita income

  Answer(d) Per capita income — the MPI is deliberately non-monetary. Its three equally weighted dimensions are health, education and standard of living, measured through ten household-level indicators, with no income, expenditure or PPP variable at all.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  NITI Aayog's National Multidimensional Poverty Index differs from the global MPI mainly in that it

  • (a)uses two dimensions instead of three
  • (b)uses twelve indicators instead of ten, adding maternal health and bank account
  • (c)replaces the health dimension with an income dimension
  • (d)is computed by the World Bank for India

  Answer(b) uses twelve indicators instead of ten, adding maternal health and bank account — the three dimensions of health, education and standard of living are retained, and the baseline national report was published in 2021.