Key Facts

Citing the World Bank's latest Poverty and Equity Brief, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said India's extreme poverty rate, measured at $3 a day, fell from 27.1% in 2011 to 2.6% in 2023, a drop of about 90%. At the $4.20-a-day line used for lower-middle-income countries, poverty fell from 57.7% in 2011 to 16.1% in 2023 and is projected to reach 12.1% by 2028. The Prime Minister added that employment grew by 13.4 crore between 2017 and 2023, nearly twice the rise in the working-age population, and that India's Gini index fell from 29 to 23 over the period. He said nearly 50 crore people moved out of poverty in 12 years.

GK Context

The World Bank updated its international poverty lines to 2021 purchasing power parity prices, setting the extreme poverty line at $3.00 per day, with $4.20 for lower-middle-income and $8.30 for upper-middle-income countries. The Gini coefficient or index, named after Corrado Gini, measures inequality in the distribution of income or wealth on a scale where 0 means perfect equality and 100 (or 1) perfect inequality. Poverty estimates from the World Bank use consumption-based household surveys.