Key Details
The Asian Development Bank’s Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 2026: Measuring Deprivation at Household and Individual Level introduces a Dual-Lens Deprivation framework, combining household poverty with the personal circumstances of adults aged 25–49 across 23 developing economies.
Regional scale: More than two in five adults, or approximately 526 million people, experienced deprivation under the combined framework.
Hidden deprivation: Around 31% of adults were individually deprived despite living in households not classified as multidimensionally poor. Another 8% faced deprivation at both household and individual levels.
Leading deficits: Lack of health insurance, ownership of a house or land, and internet access each affected more than 40% of adults in the regional sample.
Gender divide: Across the covered economies, 51% of women experienced deprivation compared with approximately 35% of men.
India evidence: The India analysis uses 2021 Demographic and Health Survey data, with approximately 250,000 respondents representing an estimated 527 million adults aged 25–49 after weighting.
India’s position: The report places India alongside Afghanistan, Nepal and Pakistan as the economies with the most pronounced differences between women’s and men’s deprivation.
Poverty Measurement Can Miss Inequality Inside the Home
Conventional multidimensional poverty measures assess shared household conditions such as education, health and living standards. Everyone in the same household is consequently treated as having an equivalent poverty status.
The ADB’s individual measure tests that assumption. Two adults sharing a home may have very different access to employment, property, financial services, healthcare protection, digital connectivity and household decisions. A household may therefore cross a poverty threshold without every member gaining comparable economic security or agency.
This is particularly important for women. A woman living in a household considered non-poor may still have no paid employment, no property in her name and little control over household finances. None of these disadvantages necessarily changes the household’s conventional poverty classification.
India’s Gender Gap Extends Beyond Income
India is among the economies showing the widest differences between women and men under the report’s framework. Across the regional sample, women’s disadvantage is driven most strongly by unequal labour-market participation, with further gaps in property ownership, financial access, internet use and decision-making.
The report also finds that partnered women are more likely to experience individual deprivation than women heading their own households. This points to an important distinction: living in a household with resources does not necessarily mean having access to or control over those resources.
The analysis does not produce a new official Indian poverty rate. It offers a broader diagnostic of how opportunity and economic agency are distributed within households.
Rural India Retains an Additional Layer of Disadvantage
Deprivation was higher in rural areas in 21 of the 23 economies examined, and India is among the countries where a material rural–urban gap remains visible.
Rural disadvantage is not confined to infrastructure. It can combine weaker access to employment, health protection, digital connectivity, financial services and productive assets. This means that improvements in electricity, sanitation or housing may coexist with continued individual-level barriers to economic participation.
Core Deprivation Has Fallen, but Personal Disadvantages Persist
India recorded one of the more significant reductions in core deprivation between the survey periods examined. This category covers people who are both individually deprived and members of multidimensionally poor households.
That improvement is important because it suggests progress among those experiencing overlapping disadvantages. Yet the report’s wider finding is that individual deprivation generally declines more slowly than household deprivation. Infrastructure and household welfare programmes can improve shared living conditions without automatically changing who owns assets, earns an income, uses financial services or participates in decisions.
What Is Dual-Lens Deprivation?
The Dual-Lens Deprivation framework classifies adults by combining household and individual conditions:
Core deprived: The person is individually deprived and lives in a multidimensionally poor household.
Household-level deprived: The person lives in a poor household but does not meet the individual deprivation threshold.
Individual-level deprived: The person is deprived personally despite living in a household not classified as poor.
The framework does not replace monetary poverty or the Multidimensional Poverty Index. It shows who may remain excluded within households that appear adequately placed under those measures.
Policy Relevance
For India, the report raises three different tests for social policy:
Policy stage | Question raised by the findings |
|---|---|
Eligibility | Does identifying beneficiaries primarily through household conditions exclude individuals facing serious personal disadvantages? |
Delivery | When a household receives an asset, account, connection or benefit, which member can actually use or control it? |
Evaluation | Are programmes tracking only household coverage, or also changes in women’s employment, property ownership, financial use, connectivity and decision-making? |
Household targeting remains suitable for shared requirements such as housing, sanitation, electricity and drinking water. Personal disadvantages may require individual-level identification and delivery, particularly in programmes addressing women’s livelihoods, social protection, digital inclusion and asset ownership.
The India estimates are based on 2021 survey data, not conditions measured in 2026. The immediate policy value lies in the report’s measurement approach: national surveys and programme evaluations can pair household indicators with sex-disaggregated, individual-level evidence to reveal who is not benefiting from recorded household progress.
Follow the Full Report Here: Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 2026: Measuring Deprivation at Household and Individual Level