UPPSC 2025 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 124 of 150

Correct — D, Only 1. Statement 1 is true. The global Multidimensional Poverty Index was developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative with the support of the United Nations Development Programme, and was introduced in the Human Development Report of 2010, replacing the Human Poverty Index that the UNDP had used since the 1997 report. Statement 2 is false, and the phrase 'less than one dollar per day' is the tell. That is the language of the World Bank's monetary international poverty line, a completely different instrument. The MPI is deliberately non-monetary: no income, expenditure or purchasing-power variable enters it at any point. It counts deprivations inside the household across three equally weighted dimensions — health, education and standard of living — unpacked into ten indicators: nutrition and child mortality; years of schooling and school attendance; and cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and assets. Under the Alkire-Foster method a household is identified as MPI poor when its weighted deprivation score reaches one-third or more, and the index itself is the product of incidence (the share of people who are poor) and intensity (the average share of deprivations they suffer). A household earning above any dollar threshold but living without sanitation, clean cooking fuel and schooling is MPI poor; a household with none of those deprivations is not, whatever it earns. Since statement 1 stands and statement 2 falls, the answer is (d), Only 1.

• (a)Only 2 — This inverts the truth: statement 2 is the false one. Counting people who live on less than a given number of dollars a day is the World Bank's income-based measure of extreme poverty, not the MPI. And statement 1, which this option rejects, is correct — the index was developed and introduced in 2010.
• (b)Both 1 and 2 — Right about the year, wrong about the method. The MPI's entire reason for existing is that a money-metric line misses households that have some cash income yet no toilet, no clean cooking fuel and no schooling. Building an income threshold into it would defeat its purpose, and none is there — UPSC made exactly this point in 2012 by listing purchasing power parity and other macroeconomic variables as things the MPI does not cover.
• (c)Neither 1 nor 2 — Statement 1 is correct, so this option cannot be. The global MPI was created by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative with UNDP support and published for the first time in the 2010 Human Development Report — UPPSC itself asked for that year in its 2020 paper.

There are two quite different ways to count the poor, and confusing them is the whole content of this question. The money-metric way sets a consumption or income threshold and counts everyone below it; the World Bank's international extreme-poverty line is the global version of that approach, and India's own official line — successively redrawn by the Alagh, Lakdawala, Tendulkar and Rangarajan exercises — is the domestic version. The multidimensional way ignores income entirely and asks instead what a household actually lacks. The global Multidimensional Poverty Index, developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative with UNDP support and introduced in the Human Development Report 2010, takes three equally weighted dimensions — health, education and standard of living — and ten indicators between them, identifies a household as poor when its weighted deprivation score reaches one-third, and reports the product of incidence and intensity. It replaced the Human Poverty Index of 1997, whose weakness was that it averaged deprivation across a country and so could not say whether the same people suffered several deprivations at once.

Two-statement questions on an index are usually decided by a single word planted in one statement, and here that word is 'dollar'. Any clause that puts a currency amount inside the MPI is wrong by construction, because the index contains no monetary variable at all. Statement 1 needs a date rather than a concept, and 2010 is easy to hold because it comes with a story: the Human Development Report introduced the Human Poverty Index in 1997 and replaced it thirteen years later with the MPI. Notice how the paper builds the trap — statement 2 pairs a true-sounding phrase ('it measures extreme poverty', which the index does in its own sense) with an alien one ('less than one dollar per day'), so a candidate who reads only the first half will accept the whole. Read to the end of the statement before scoring it.

• The global Multidimensional Poverty Index was developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative with UNDP support and introduced in the Human Development Report 2010, replacing the Human Poverty Index of the 1997 report
• It uses three equally weighted dimensions — health, education and standard of living — and ten indicators: nutrition, child mortality; years of schooling, school attendance; and cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and assets
• Under the Alkire-Foster method a household is MPI poor if its weighted deprivation score is one-third or more; the index is the product of incidence (H) and intensity (A). No income, expenditure or purchasing-power variable enters it
• Counting people living below a stated amount per day is the World Bank's separate, money-metric international poverty line, which has been revised upward repeatedly as purchasing-power-parity benchmarks were updated — about a dollar a day in the 1990s, then 1.25, then 1.90, then 2.15 dollars a day, and revised again with the newer PPP round
• NITI Aayog's National Multidimensional Poverty Index, whose first baseline report appeared in 2021, keeps the same three dimensions but uses twelve indicators, adding maternal health and a bank account

• Reading 'poverty index' as 'income measure'. The MPI contains no income, expenditure or PPP variable — that absence is the entire point of the instrument
• Confusing the MPI with the Human Poverty Index it replaced. The HPI came in the 1997 Human Development Report and the MPI in the 2010 one
• Confusing the global MPI (OPHI with UNDP, ten indicators) with NITI Aayog's National MPI (twelve indicators), or quoting one's headcount for the other

UPPSC returns to this index repeatedly and from different sides — 2019 asked which dimensions it includes, 2020 asked in which year the Human Development Report replaced the Human Poverty Index with the MPI, and 2025 folds both into a two-statement item. UPSC has asked it once, in 2012, and did so by planting macroeconomic decoys — purchasing power parity, budget deficit, GDP growth rate — which is the same trick as the 'one dollar per day' clause here.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The global Multidimensional Poverty Index was developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative with the support of which one of the following?

  • (a)The World Bank
  • (b)The United Nations Development Programme
  • (c)The International Monetary Fund
  • (d)The International Labour Organisation

  Answer(b) The United Nations Development Programme — OPHI developed the index with UNDP support, and it was first published in the UNDP's Human Development Report 2010.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Under the global Multidimensional Poverty Index, a household is identified as multidimensionally poor when its weighted deprivation score is

  • (a)one-tenth or more
  • (b)one-fifth or more
  • (c)one-third or more
  • (d)one-half or more

  Answer(c) one-third or more — the Alkire-Foster cutoff. A household deprived in at least one-third of the weighted indicators is counted as MPI poor.