Outdated 11MP poverty index fails urban poor, says social activist
(TMI) – Putrajaya risks failing its 11th Malaysia Plan goal to raise the livelihoods of the bottom 40% of society due to outdated methods of measuring poverty, said a social activist and academic.
Datuk Dr Denison Jayasooria said key elements in a new index which indicated whether a household was poor or vulnerable to slipping into poverty did not match Malaysia’s current development level.
Under the 11MP, Putrajaya will use a new index called the multi-dimensional poverty index (MPI). It has 11 indicators to measure whether a household is poor or vulnerable.
The fear was that since the index was used to determine who qualified for aid, certain households could be overlooked because they were not classified as poor, said Jayasooria, who is with Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM).
The problem was the indicators, he said, were old and would be relevant for the Malaysia of the 1970s, when there were high levels of absolute poverty and almost half of the population lived in rural areas.
“The index is not rigorous enough and does not delve deeper into the nature of current Malaysian society to measure deprivation of basic needs,” said Jayasooria, who is a senior fellow at UKM’s Institute of Ethnic Studies.
“The index’s indicators must reflect our level of development because we are no longer a country where you have huge numbers of people starving on the streets,” said Jayasooria, who studied poor and vulnerable groups under a variety of national organisations.
