India’s extreme poverty down by 12.3% in last decade, says World Bank

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New Delhi: India’s extreme poverty has declined by 12.3% in 2019 from 2011, the World Bank has found.

Extreme poverty is measured in the terms of the number of people living on less than $1.90 or Rs 145 a day.

A working paper of the bank said rural poverty declined from 26.3% in 2011 to 11.6% in 2019. The decline in urban areas was from 14.2% to 6.3% in the same period.

To sum up, the poverty level in rural and urban areas went down by 14.7 and 7.9 percentage points, respectively.

The paper titled, ‘Poverty In India Has Declined Over The Last Decade But Not As Much As Previously Thought’, was jointly authored by Sutirtha Sinha Roy and Roy van der Weide.

“Finally, the extent of poverty reduction during 2015-2019 is estimated to be notably lower than earlier projections based on growth in private final consumption expenditure reported in national account statistics,” Sinha Roy and Weide said.

The global bank’s policy research team also said the poverty headcount in the country has dropped from 22.5% in 2011 to 10.2% in 2019 with rural areas showing better results.

The study noted that farmers with small landholdings have seen higher growth. It said: “Real incomes for farmers with the smallest landholdings have grown by 10 percent in annualized terms between the two survey rounds (2013 and 2019) compared to a 2% growth for farmers with the largest landholding.”

The World Bank paper is a significant indicator of India’s poverty levels as the country itself has no recent official estimation.

The last expenditure survey of India’s poverty and inequality was in 2011 by the National Sample Survey Organisation.

Interestingly, a recent International Monetary Fund paper had also suggested that extreme poverty in India was as low as 0.8% in 2019. Authors Surjit Bhalla, Karan Bhasin and Arvind Virmani noted the country had kept up the level in pandemic year 2020 by transferring food through the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana.

rashmisalvi on April 19th, 2022 at 04:51 UTC »

Poverty rates are decided by per day earnings of less than 3 dollars in urban areas and less than 2 dollars in rural areas. (these figures are just from my memory but they are not much far away from actual figures). And when the rates have not changed for a long time it will seem that poverty is on decrease.

We have done a lot of work for reduction of poverty in past 2-3 decades but a lot of it which outside world sees are just numbers which some bureaucrat has put in a file. On actual ground level we have a long long long way to go.

Source: I am an Indian who likes to help people in poverty/homelessness and sees the reality daily.

vineyardmike on April 19th, 2022 at 02:30 UTC »

Stephen Pinker talks alot about the reduction in extreme poverty. I forget the exact number but it's like 100,000 people per day for the last 30 years. That's about half the planet.

Henryparson on April 19th, 2022 at 01:35 UTC »

That’s awesome. How did India do this?

Edit- Many thanks for all the details. Really interesting programs that seem to be working.