“Over the past decade, India has significantly reduced poverty. Extreme poverty (living on less than $2.15 per day) fell from 16.2 percent in 2011-12 to 2.3 percent in 2022-23, lifting 171 million people above this line. Rural extreme poverty dropped from 18.4 percent to 2.8 percent, and urban from 10.7 percent to 1.1 percent, narrowing the rural-urban gap from 7.7 to 1.7 percentage points—a 16 percent annual decline. India also transitioned into the lower-middle-income category. Using the $3.65 per day LMIC poverty line, poverty fell from 61.8 percent to 28.1 percent, lifting 378 million people out of poverty. Rural poverty dropped from 69 percent to 32.5 percent, and urban poverty from 43.5 percent to 17.2 percent, reducing the rural-urban gap from 25 to 15 percentage points with a 7 percent annual decline.”

From World Bank.

“Between 2008 and 2023, multidimensional poverty in Latin America fell significantly—from 45.8% to 25.4%. This steady decline, averaging 1.4% per year, was only interrupted in 2020 due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic…

The MPI-LA complements traditional income-based measures by incorporating four key dimensions of well-being: housing, health, education, and employment. It goes further by including indicators like job quality, access to social protection, exclusion from the workforce due to unpaid domestic work, and internet connectivity.”

From United Nations Development Programme.

“Overall, the estimates reveal a remarkable decline in poverty across India in the last 12 years. In rural areas, poverty declined from 30.4 per cent to 3.9 per cent, while in urban areas, it declined from 26.4 per cent to 3.9 per cent. A similar magnitude of decline has been documented by Surjit Bhalla and Karan Bhasin.”

From Indian Express.

“The most recent survey, which covers the year to July, shows that only 1% of India’s households fell below the international poverty line in 2024, according to an analysis of the data by Surjit Bhalla, a former executive director of the IMF, and Karan Bhasin of the State University of New York, Albany. Heir to the famous “dollar a day” poverty line, the international poverty line now stands at $2.15 a day at purchasing-power parity. India has, therefore, all but eliminated the most extreme forms of poverty.

This is wonderful news in its own right. But India’s success also calls into question a common assumption about development: that the eradication of poverty requires a manufacturing miracle, drawing masses of peasants out of the farms and into the factories. More than 40% of India’s workers are still employed in agriculture. Perhaps people can leave poverty without leaving the land. That is also one conclusion of a new paper by Vincent Armentano, Paul Niehaus and Tom Vogl, all of the University of California, San Diego, which examines some of the paths out of poverty taken by five big emerging economies—China, Indonesia, Mexico and South Africa, as well as India—from 1984 to 2017.”

From The Economist.