Determinants of Multidimensional Poverty in Rural Tripura, India

Human deprivations in core components of life like health, education and standard of living are multidimensional in nature, also the means and ends in economic wellbeing. These deprivations are serious than income poverty as they have a direct relation with it by feeding each other to clutch the poor in a sustainable poverty trap. People’s achievements in non-monetary core components can be conducive to break such poverty trap in the long run. So, investigating the causes of multidimensional deprivations and poverty has important policy bearing, particularly for a geographically isolated, economically backward and poverty ridden state like Tripura, in the Northeast India. This study is an attempt towards that direction by estimating incidence and intensity of multidimensional poverty and its contributors for the rural households in Tripura. It uses multi-stage random sampling method and decomposes inequality of deprivation scores between and within social and religious groups. The determinants of the likelihood of falling into multidimensional poverty are explored through binary logit regression. The study gives significant insights into the variations in multidimensional poverty across the social and religious groups. The regression results suggest that dependency ratio, years of schooling, occupation and gender of the household’s head as well as per capita monthly income and amount of credit taken by the households play significant roles towards explaining the variations in incidence and intensity of multidimensional poverty. This exploration helps understanding the root causes of multidimensional poverty and the desired policy interventions for eliminating poverty in the rural areas of Tripura, India.