What is meant by multidimensional approach to poverty and how is it Different from the concept of income poverty?

 The MPI is the most prominent application of multidimensional poverty measurement; it incorporates three dimensions at the household level: health, education, and wealth.

                                                             Income is imperfectly measured, but even more important, the advantages provided by a given amount of income greatly differ, depending on the circumstance. To capture this idea, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) used its Human Poverty Index from 1997 to 2009.

                                                        In 2010, the UNDP replaced the HPI with its Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI); by building up the index from the household level, the MPI takes into account that there are negative interaction effects when people have multiple deprivations-worse poverty than can be seen by simply adding up separate deprivations for the whole country, then taking averages, and only then combining them.

The index's creators report that they selected the three dimensions (health, education, and standard of living) and each of their corresponding indicators because they reflect problems often mentioned by the poor, they have been long considered important by the development community particularly as reflected in the Millennium Development Goals, and they are well established philosophically as human rights or basic needs; naturally, reliable data also had to be available for enough countries when selecting specific indicators for the index.

Concerning health, two indicators-whether any child has died in the family and whether any adult or child in the family is malnourished-are weighted equally (so each counts one-sixth toward the maximum possible deprivation in the MPI). Regarding education also, two indicators-whether not even one household member has completed five years of schooling and whether any school-age child is out of school for grades one through eight-are given equal weight (so again, each counts one-sixth toward the MPI). Finally, in terms of standard of living, equal weight is placed on six deprivations (each counting one-eighteenth toward the maximum possible): lack of electricity, insufficiently safe drinking water, inadequate sanitation, inadequate flooring, unimproved cooking fuel, and lack of more than one of five assets-telephone, radio, television, bicycle, and motorbike or similar vehicle.