Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
– By Rabindranath Tagore
What Is Deprivation?
The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines deprivation as the removal, denial, or unavailability of something needed or desired. The entry lists several related senses of the word: a lack of opportunity to participate in the cultural offerings of the larger society due to factors such as economic privation, substandard living conditions, or discrimination; a loss of identification with one’s cultural heritage through assimilation into a dominant culture; a lack of culturally stimulating phenomena in one’s environment; and, in its earliest clinical use, a lack of adequate nurturing for a young child or animal due to the absence, premature loss, or neglect of a mother or primary carer, thought to affect early behavioural, physical, social, and emotional development.
Taken together, these senses show how broad the idea of privation really is. It covers wants, psychological loss, and social exclusion all at once.
The earliest treatment of deprivation in poverty research was largely absolute. A household was considered deprived if its income or consumption fell below a fixed threshold, insufficient to meet basic biological needs such as food, shelter, and clothing. This approach underlies most official poverty lines, including India’s own Tendulkar and Rangarajan committee estimates, both of which defined poverty as a form of privation measured against a minimum expenditure basket.
Relative Deprivation
A decisive shift in thinking came from the sociologist Peter Townsend, who argued that deprivation could only be understood in relation to the standards prevailing in a given society. Townsend defined it as a state of observable disadvantage relative to the local community, wider society, or nation to which an individual, family, or group belongs (Townsend, 1987, as cited in Bécares & Nazroo, 2015).
Around the same period, the sociologist W. G. Runciman offered a more psychological account of privation. Runciman held that a person experiences this sense of it when they do not possess something, are aware that others possess it, want it themselves, and believe that obtaining it is realistic (Runciman, 1966, as cited in Kim et al., 2023).
He distinguished “egoistic” privation, which arises from an individual’s unfavourable position relative to others in their own group, from “fraternal” privation, which arises instead from comparisons between entire groups. The distinction has since been used to explain phenomena as varied as voting behaviour and the emergence of social movements (Toolshero, n.d.).
Deprivation as Capability Failure: Amartya Sen
The most influential reworking of deprivation for development economics came from Amartya Sen. Sen argued that poverty is better understood not as low income but as capability privation, a shortfall in the real freedoms and opportunities a person has to live the kind of life they value. In Sen’s framework, what matters is whether a person can be adequately nourished, can avoid preventable illness, can be educated, and can take part in the life of their community.
Because two people with identical incomes may still face very different capability sets, owing to disability, discrimination, or geography, an income-only measure of deprivation tends to miss important dimensions of disadvantage (Sen, cited in Rauhut, 2021). Sen’s later work with Jean Drèze argued that combating deprivation requires public action on health and education, not income transfers alone (Rauhut, 2021).
This capability lens went on to inspire the Alkire-Foster method, developed by Sabina Alkire and James Foster, which counts the number of overlapping deprivations a household experiences across a defined set of indicators and classifies a household as multidimensionally poor if its deprivation score crosses a specified cut off (UNDP, 2010, as cited in UNDP India, 2023). This method now underlies both the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index and India’s own National MPI, and it remains the most widely used tool for measuring deprivation at scale.
Measuring Deprivation in India: The National Multidimensional Poverty Index
In 2021, NITI Aayog released India’s first National MPI, based on National Family Health Survey (NFHS 4) data. This was followed by a progress review in 2023 using NFHS 5 (2019 to 2021) data, developed jointly with the United Nations Development Programme and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (UNDP India, 2023). The index measures simultaneous deprivation across three equally weighted dimensions, health and nutrition, education, and standard of living, represented by twelve indicators aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals.
Under this index, a person is classified as multidimensionally poor if their weighted deprivation score equals or exceeds a cutoff of 33.33 percent, meaning they face deprivation across roughly a third or more of the weighted indicators (NITI Aayog, 2023). The overall MPI value is calculated by multiplying the headcount ratio, the proportion of the population that is poor, by the intensity of poverty, which is the average level of deprivation experienced by those already classified as poor.
Nutrition alone contributes close to 30 percent of the deprivation captured in the index, making it the single largest driver of multidimensional poverty in the country. Deprivation in years of schooling accounts for a further 16.65 percent, and inadequate school attendance for 9.10 percent. On living standards, around 44 percent of the population still faced deprivation in access to clean cooking fuel, close to 30 percent remained deprived of adequate sanitation, and 41 percent still experienced housing deprivation, notwithstanding recent improvement (Shankar IAS Parliament, 2023).
India in the Global Mirror: The 2024 Global MPI
India’s record looks somewhat different when set against global data. The 2024 Global MPI, jointly published by UNDP and OPHI under the theme “Poverty Amid Conflict”, found that 1.1 billion people across 112 countries, about 18 percent of the population covered, lived in acute multidimensional poverty. India recorded the largest absolute number of people in extreme poverty of any country studied, at 234 million. According to the accompanying OPHI country briefing, the intensity of deprivation among India’s multidimensionally poor population, the average share of weighted indicators in which a poor person is deprived, stood at 42.0 percent, yielding an overall MPI value of 0.069 (OPHI/UNDP, 2024).
Caste, Nutrition, and the Social Patterning of Deprivation
Aggregate national figures conceal sharp social gradients in who bears the greatest burden of deprivation. Data from NFHS 5 show that children from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities face a substantially higher risk of undernutrition than children from other social groups, even after accounting for household wealth (Springer, 2024). One nationally representative analysis found stunting prevalence of 39.2 percent among Scheduled Caste children and 40.9 percent among Scheduled Tribe children, compared with lower rates among general category and Other Backward Class children (Scientific Reports, 2024).
A related study using NFHS 2015 to 16 and 2019 to 21 data found that ethnicity-based disparities in stunting and underweight status persist across survey rounds independent of education and economic status, pointing to structural rather than purely income-driven deprivation. This caste-patterned deprivation in early childhood nutrition remains a subject of active, and at times contentious, research and public debate in India.
Regional clustering compounds the picture. Several districts in Assam and Meghalaya have shown persistently high concentrations of child undernutrition across both NFHS 4 and NFHS 5, suggesting that geographic deprivation and social deprivation frequently overlap (ScienceDirect, 2022). Overall, the lowest wealth quintile experiences considerably higher rates of stunting than wealthier households, a reminder that economic deprivation and social deprivation tend to reinforce one another rather than operate as independent forces.
Government Response and the Trajectory of Change
India’s National MPI reports credit much of the recorded decline in deprivation to targeted public programmes. Enhanced healthcare access under initiatives such as Poshan Abhiyan and Anaemia Mukt Bharat is credited with reducing nutrition-related deprivation, while the Targeted Public Distribution System, which covers over 81 crore beneficiaries, has helped offset food deprivation among low-income rural and urban households. A longer term NITI Aayog discussion paper tracing deprivation trends since 2005 to 06 estimated that roughly 24.82 crore people escaped multidimensional poverty over that period, and projected that India is likely to meet SDG target 1.2, halving deprivation in all its forms, well ahead of the 2030 deadline.
– AKANKSHA GAUTAM
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