India’s achievement comes even as the multilateral lender raised the global threshold to measure extreme poverty to $3 per person per day from $2.15 and incorporated the 2021 purchasing power parity (PPP) for the calculation.
“While the change (in threshold) led to a global increase in the count of extreme poverty by 125 million, India emerged as a statistical outlier in a positive direction,” the government said in a statement Saturday.
In absolute numbers, the population living in extreme poverty in India fell to 75.2 million in 2022-23 from 344.5 million 11 years earlier.
“In the face of a raised poverty benchmark, India showed that more honest data, not diluted standards, can reveal real progress,” the government said.
India transitioned to a Modified Mixed Recall Period method from the Uniform Reference Period in its Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES), a change that resulted in higher measured consumption and subsequently lower poverty estimates. Globally, the revised poverty line would have added 226 million people to the count of extremely poor. However, India’s methodology revision partially offset the increase.
The World Bank raised the global extreme poverty rate for 2022 to 10.5% from the earlier estimate of 9%, increasing the number of people living below the poverty line, increasing the number of people living below the poverty line to 838 million from 713 million.
“Given India’s share of the global population, its methodological changes matter for the global poverty trends,” the World Bank noted. Using the previous $2.15 (2017 PPP) poverty line, the World Bank reported a 1.3-percentage-point drop in global extreme poverty to 7.7% in 2022, largely due to 125 million fewer extreme poor people in India.
Based on this earlier benchmark, the share of Indians living below the poverty line fell to 2.4% in 2022- 23 from 16.2% in 2011-12, according to the data from the World Bank.
“As the global community recalibrates poverty goals, India’s example sets a precedent: evidencebased governance, sustained reforms, and methodological integrity can together deliver transformational outcomes,” said the government.
Spending inequality narrowed across India, according to the HCES 2023-24. In rural areas, the average monthly per capita consumption expenditure increased
