Extreme poverty in India declined by 12 percentage points between 2011-2019: World Bank

Extreme poverty in India declined by 12.3 percentage points in 2019 compared to 2011 with poverty headcount rate declining to 10.2 per cent in 2019, a World Bank Working Paper said suggesting that the decline has been sharper in rural India.

In rural India, poverty declined from 26.3 per cent in 2011 to 11.6 per cent in 2019, the report said.

“Rural and urban poverty dropped by 14.7 and 7.9 percentage points during 2011-2019,” said the paper, co-authored by economists Sutirtha Sinha Roy and Roy van der Weide.

It said farmers with small landholdings witnessed higher income growth.

Also read: Poverty was at its lowest in India in 2020: IMF report

"Real incomes for farmers with the smallest landholdings have grown by 10 per cent in annualised terms between the two survey rounds [2013 and 2019] compared to a 2 per cent growth for farmers with the largest landholding,” the paper said.

The paper said there were at least two instances between 2011 and 2019 when poverty marginally increased for a brief period. These were the periods around the 2019 demonetisation drive and the economic slowdown after that.

In India, the number of people living in extreme poverty is defined by the World Bank as living on $1.9 or less in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms.

The World Bank research comes close on the heels of the International Monetary Fund saying India has almost eradicated extreme poverty and brought down consumption inequality to its lowest levels in 40 years through state-provided food handouts.

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