The poverty of an entity is manifest in her deprivation not only in income but also in other dimensions such as health, nutrition and sanitation. Hence, a comprehensive measure of poverty must ideally take into account the performance of an individual across multiple dimensions. Vulnerability to poverty captures the likelihood of an entity falling into poverty, given the current status of the household. Unlike poverty, which describes the status of an entity at a point of time, vulnerability is predictive in nature. This study ranks 15 major states in terms of multidimensional poverty and vulnerability to multidimensional poverty at two time points in the 1990s. The results show that both multidimensional poverty and vulnerability provide additional insights for prescriptive policies.
