What is India's progress on hunger and poverty after 2014? Explain.

Poverty: what moved

• NITI Aayog’s national Multidimensional Poverty Index, using NFHS, estimates that about 24.82 crore people exited multidimensional poverty between 2013–14 and 2022–23, with the index falling from 29.17 per cent to 11.28 per cent.
• Indicators that pulled the MPI down include sanitation, cooking fuel, electricity, bank accounts, and housing — Jal Jeevan, Swachh Bharat, Ujjwala, Jan Dhan, and PMAY sit inside that arithmetic.
• Extreme-poverty headcounts at international PPP lines also show a decline in World Bank and some IMF readings, though India no longer publishes a single official Tendulkar consumption-poverty number on the old schedule.
• Rural distress was buffered by MGNREGA, PM-KISAN, and later COVID food transfers; urban informal poverty remains less well measured.

Hunger and food

• The National Food Security Act, 2013, plus Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana during and after COVID, put free or highly subsidised grain in most NFSA cards; the later decision to continue free foodgrains for a period made calorie access a political floor.
• POSHAN Abhiyaan, ICDS, mid-day meals, and Anaemia Mukt Bharat are the nutrition missions; they are why hunger policy is no longer only a grain sack.

Where progress is incomplete

• NFHS-5 (2019–21) still showed stunting near 35.5 per cent, wasting near 19 per cent, and very high anaemia among women and children — diet quality, infection, and care, not only PDS rice.
• The Global Hunger Index has ranked India poorly; the government rejects GHI’s child-undernutrition-heavy method as not a measure of famine-style hunger in a country with a rights-based PDS.
• Regional and social gaps remain: some BIMARU districts, Adivasi belts, and urban homeless households do not match the national MPI story.

How to explain “progress”

• After 2014 India reduced multidimensional poverty and expanded food entitlement more than it closed the child-nutrition and anaemia gap.
• That is progress on hunger-as-access and poverty-as-deprivation, with a remaining deficit on hunger-as-nutrition.