Paper short abstract:

This is an empirical investigation of a third sector’s impact in reducing multidimensional poverty in Kolkata slums. In 2019, Calcutta Rescue developed a slum-specific index for assessing multidimensional poverty in 23 slums by using a self-designed primary survey. The survey is being repeated in 2024 across 25 slums to explore how multidimensional poverty has changed during the past five years.

Paper long abstract:

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have set target 1.2 to reduce poverty in all its forms and target 11.1 to upgrade slums by 2030. Employing the Demographic Health Survey datasets, NITI Aayog found that nationally 135 million people had escaped multidimensional poverty between 2015/16 and 2019/21. However, nationally representative surveys often do not appropriately cover urban slum areas consisting of informal settlements. Generally, urban slums are characteristically distinct from other areas, lack of adequate infrastructure and basic amenities and witness rapid rural-urban migration. Both governmental- and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) play active roles in their attempts to alleviate poverty and to improve the livelihood of slum dwellers. In this paper, we specifically explore the impact of the interventions of Calcutta Rescue (CR), which is a medium-size NGO providing essential services to Kolkata-based underprivileged slum dwellers, in reducing multidimensional poverty in the areas that the NGO covers.

Calcutta Rescue developed a slum-specific index for assessing multidimensional poverty in 2019 drawing from the well-known counting approach based Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (G-MPI), which was founded on the capability approach framework. For the construction of CR’s index of multidimensional poverty, three broad dimensions (i.e., Health, Education and Standard of living) were chosen, which were further subdivided into seventeen indicators. The choice of such extensive set of indicators has been justified by how Calcutta Rescue provides support to the beneficiaries. In 2019, the new slum-specific index of multidimensional poverty was used to rank twenty-three slums where CR had a working presence and to better understand the degree of multiple deprivations across these slums by using a self-designed primary household survey across 867 families. The household survey is being repeated in 2024 across twenty-five slums to explore how multidimensional poverty has changed during the past five years. The present household survey is currently underway, where CR has completed interviews in ten slums so far. The aim is to collect a sample of 1,200 households for the 2024 round of the survey. To ensure consistency of comparison across slums over time, we utilise systematic sampling techniques across both household surveys interviewing 30 or 20% of households in each slum, whichever is larger.

Our preliminary results, based on the partly-completed survey in ten slums, show that multidimensional poverty levels have fallen with respect to the previous round in most slums if not in all slums and, overall, the highest deprivation is observed in the fear of eviction, housing materials and disease knowledge in the previous survey round. We aim to conduct further analysis when the survey is completed around mid-April. Besides examining the trends in multidimensional poverty as well as the change in the composition of multidimensional poverty over the past five years in the slums, we aim to conduct microeconomic analysis of the key household specific factors and slum characteristics that are associated with higher or lower multidimensional deprivations at the household level. We further aim to scrutinise the policies implemented by the CR in response to the 2019 survey as well as the external factors (e.g., the Covid-19 pandemic, governmental policy changes etc.) that may have played crucial roles during 2019-2024.

Although our current study is focused on the slums of one specific region, but our study has wider implications. The policy lessons learnt from our study may be used as an exercise for other third sectors attempting to address multiple forms of deprivation within India as well as outside India.