Multidimensional Child Poverty in the City of Kolkata: Construction and Identification from the Perspective of 8 years old School-going Children

The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1 aims to end poverty in all its forms, everywhere. Although children experience poverty differently from adults and their needs and expectations are different, child poverty is rarely differentiated from adult poverty, and its special dimensions are often recognised. For the first time, as part of the SDGs, countries have committed to addressing child poverty specifically and directly, which is not derived from household poverty. This article aims to measure multidimensional child specific poverty in India in response to such global norms and trends focusing on the child rather than the household as a whole. We utilise the data collected in the third wave of “Children’s Worlds Survey, 2016–19” for India, which was conducted in the metro city of Kolkata in place of all over the country, bearing in mind the financial as well as the time constraints. This survey allows the yardstick of deprivation informed by subjective opinion of the children, the measure which takes us deeper into the ‘rights based’ approach. Measuring child specific poverty with this approach in the Indian context has not been attempted so far. This article is an effort to contribute to this end. We intend to identify the multidimensional poor school-going 8 years old children from the perspective of themselves following the dual cut-offs approach proposed by Alkire and Foster in 2011. Also, it allows us empirically test three issues like, (i) if the status of these children to be multidimensional poor is significantly gender (boys/girls) sensitive, (ii) if does it depend significantly on the region (northern/southern) the children belong to, and, (iii) if does it depend significantly on the type of school (government/private) the children are enrolled. Our findings show that in the metro city of Kolkata more than fifty percent of 8 years old children, enrolled in government schools, are multidimensional poor, whereas, the situation of private schools are quite better. This is alarming in terms of fulfillment of Sustainable Development Goal 1 targeting the eradication of poverty in all its forms and dimensions. However, we do not find significant gender bias while significant regional disparity is evidenced from our test results.