129 mn Indians living in extreme poverty in 2024

Almost 129 million Indians are living in extreme poverty in 2024, on less than $2.15 (about Rs 181) a day, down from 431 million in 1990, the World Bank said in report on Tuesday.

However, with a higher poverty standard of $6.85 (about Rs 576) per day — the poverty threshold for middle-income countries — more Indians are living below the poverty line in 2024 than in 1990, primarily driven by ‘population growth’.

Earlier, the World Bank had said that extreme poverty in India had declined by 38 million in 2021 to 167.49 million after growing in the preceding two years.

The ‘Poverty, Prosperity and Planet: Pathways out of the Polycrisis’ report, however, clarified that these new datasets had not factored in the Household Consumption and Expenditure Survey (HCES) for 2022-23 released recently.

“These new datasets are not reflected in the report, since the necessary analysis could not be completed in time.

"While the precise impact of adding these two datasets on global poverty is unclear at the time of this writing, key conclusions of the report are robust, such as the increasing concentration of extreme poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa and fragile countries, and that extreme poverty eradication by 2030 is out of reach,” it added.

The report noted that global poverty reduction had slowed to a near standstill, with 2020–2030 set to be a lost decade.

At the current pace of progress, the report noted that it would take decades to eradicate extreme poverty and more than a century to lift people above $6.85 per day mark.

The World Bank said India’s contribution to global extreme poverty was projected to decline significantly over the next decade.

“These estimates are based on projections of growth in GDP per capita over the next decade, as well as historical growth rates.

"Even setting the extreme poverty rate in India in 2030 to zero, the global extreme poverty rate in 2030 would only fall from 7.31 per cent to 6.72 per cent, still well above the 3 per cent target,” it added.

The report said the impact of the recent methodological changes in the latest HCES also needed to be examined carefully.

Since 1999-2000, India has been experimenting with various recall periods (the amount of time respondents are asked to remember past consumption events, say from a month or six months ago) to improve the accuracy of consumption data collection.

In the 2011-12 survey, India utilised three recall periods: the Uniform Recall Period (URP), Mixed Reference Period (MRP), and Modified Mixed Reference Period (MMRP).

In 2011-12, MRP was adopted for official poverty rate calculations, and it was indicated that future data collection would transition to using MMRP.

For the 2022-23 survey, India exclusively used the MMRP recall period for collecting consumption data.