This paper examines the relationship between multidimensional poverty and multidimensional vulnerability. Unlike poverty, which describes the status of a household at a point of time, vulnerability captures the likelihood of a household falling into poverty, given the current status of the household. The paper has used data from the India Human Development Survey, 2005, employing a multidimensional measure both at the all-India level and the state level. The results indicate the superiority of the multidimensional measure over the one-dimensional income measure because policy can be pointed towards addressing the dimension of poverty that is lacking and that is the cause of some states’ vulnerability to poverty.

In order to formulate policy to target the correctly identified rural poor in India, focus on an income poverty measure alone is insufficient. The purpose of this research is to study a new area of poverty measurement based on data that detail a household’s access to basic assets. The study has used the secondary data source provided by the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) for the time period of 1992, 1998 and 2005. In order to construct the asset index the technique of multiple correspondence analysis is used. A discussion of trends in asset poverty in various states in India follows, together with the policies they need to adopt depending on their state of poverty.