Nearly 100 million Pakistanis face multidimensional poverty, more than twice the rate in India and Bangladesh: UNDP report

According to Profit, citing the UNDP Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2026, nearly 100 million Pakistanis are estimated to live in multidimensional poverty. The country's reported poverty incidence of 38.3% is more than twice the level in India at 16.4% and Bangladesh at 14.9%, though the surveys used were conducted in different years. Using the 2017-18 rate on the estimated 2024 population yields 96.32 million people, a projection that does not capture any measured change since the original survey.

Pakistan's MPI value stands at 0.198, compared with 0.069 for India and 0.067 for Bangladesh, and the report measures deprivation across health, education and living standards. Severe multidimensional poverty affects 21.5% of Pakistanis, against 4.2% in India and 3.9% in Bangladesh. Education contributes the largest share of the index at 41.3%, ahead of living standards at 31.1% and health at 27.6%.

Between 2012-13 and 2017-18 the share of Pakistanis in multidimensional poverty fell from 44.5% to 38.3%, and the MPI value dropped from 0.233 to 0.198. The report cannot show whether that progress continued afterwards, since Pakistan's most recent survey in the index dates from 2017-18. Pakistan is also not among the 33 countries that halved their MPI values in periods shorter than 15 years, unlike India and Bangladesh.