A/HRC/5/3 page 5 4. The second consideration was to describe the core contents of extreme poverty in a manner that would permit the monitoring of improvement or deterioration of conditions, and the identification of policies to remove the specific conditions of extreme poverty and to establish indicators to measure progress or failure of the process of eradication. In other words, the operational definition of extreme poverty should be amenable to a process of monitoring the progress of the implementation of policies, in as an objective a manner as possible, with the help of specific indicators. 5. The third consideration was to examine some of the policy experiences of different countries and identify the manner by which the implementation of those policies could be improved within a human rights framework. II. THE MULTIDIMENSIONALITY OF POVERTY 6. To facilitate the development of a consensus around the concept of poverty and extreme poverty, the independent expert built upon the existing consensus in the international community on the multidimensionality of poverty. The international community had affirmed, in virtually all international forums, that poverty was not only confined to economic deprivation, but extended to social, cultural and political deprivation as well. While growth in gross national product (GNP) was the goal of development in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the first Human Development Report (1990) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) stated that promoting individual development has to be reckoned in terms of human development which it defined as “the process of widening people’s choices and the level of their achieved well-being”. In this context, poverty implied severe deprivation of human development. To operationalize this notion, the UNDP report introduced a Human Development Index (HDI), based on the availability of data in different countries, which captured three essential components of human rights namely longevity, knowledge and basic income for a decent living standard, as a first approximation to measuring human development as a whole. Longevity and knowledge refer to forms of human capabilities, and income is a proxy measure for the choices people have in putting their capabilities to use. This methodology was a major innovation, although economists such as Arthur Lewis had also previously emphasized the instrumental role of income growth, that not only increases wealth but also increases the range of human choice because it gives man greater control over his environment, and thereby increases his freedom.2 The Human Development Report clearly emphasized the need for policies specifically aimed at the expansion of human capabilities, which the instrumentality of income growth alone could not capture. 7. The Copenhagen Declaration of the World Summit for Social Development in 1995 clearly stated, that “Poverty has various manifestations, including lack of income and productive resources sufficient to ensure sustainable livelihood; hunger and malnutrition; ill-health; minimum and lack of access to education and other basic services increase morbidity and mortality from illness; homelessness and inadequate housing; unsafe environment; and social 2 See W. Arthur Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth, 9-10, 420-21 (1955).