Goal 1: No Poverty

What Goal 1 asks for

Goal 1 is usually summarised as ending poverty, but the text of the goal is more specific than the slogan. It sets two different tests. The first is extreme poverty measured against an international poverty line, which is meant to disappear entirely by 2030. The second, and the harder one for a middle-income country like India, is poverty measured against each country's own national poverty line and in all its dimensions: the goal asks governments to at least halve the share of men, women and children living in poverty as their own country defines it. That second test is what makes Goal 1 relevant to households that are not starving but cannot absorb a hospital bill, a failed crop or a month without work.

The remaining targets describe the machinery that is supposed to keep people out of poverty rather than simply counting who is in it. One target asks countries to build social protection systems, including basic floors, that actually reach poor and vulnerable people. Another asks that poor people have equal rights to economic resources: basic services, ownership and control over land and other property, inheritance, natural resources, new technology and financial services including microfinance. A third target is about resilience, reducing the exposure of poor households to climate-related extreme events and to economic and environmental shocks, on the reasoning that a single flood or illness can undo a decade of slow gains. Two further targets deal with mobilising money and with writing pro-poor, gender-sensitive policy frameworks.

Goal 1 in India

India measures deprivation with more than income. NITI Aayog's National Multidimensional Poverty Index classes a person as poor if they are deprived on a third or more of twelve weighted indicators spanning health, education and standard of living. Its discussion paper, released in January 2024, reported that the multidimensional poverty headcount ratio fell from 29.17 per cent in 2013-14 to 11.28 per cent in 2022-23, with about 24.82 crore people moving out of multidimensional poverty over those nine years, and the largest absolute declines in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. The same paper credits a stack of programmes rather than any single one, because the index moves only when several deprivations fall together.

The main instruments are national in scale. The National Food Security Act, 2013 gives up to 75 per cent of the rural population and 50 per cent of the urban population a legal entitlement to subsidised foodgrain, with the eldest woman of the household aged 18 or above recorded as the head of household on the ration card. Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana - Gramin, launched on 1 April 2016, is building pucca houses for eligible rural families, and Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana has taken bank accounts from 14.72 crore in March 2015 to 55.22 crore by June 2025, which is what makes direct benefit transfer possible at all. Non-profits tend to work in the gap between an entitlement existing and a household actually receiving it: helping people obtain ration cards, Aadhaar-linked accounts, pensions, disability certificates and scholarship claims; reaching groups that scheme lists routinely miss, such as homeless families, seasonal migrants and denotified tribal communities; and building the household-level income sources, through self-help groups, land rights work and skills training, that decide whether a family stays out of poverty once it has left it.