Poverty In India Declined 12.3 Percentage Points Between 2011-2019: World Bank Paper

Extreme poverty in India has declined by 12.3 percentage points between 2011 and 2019, with rural areas doing well than urban centres, according to a working paper of the World Bank.

India has not released a new household consumption survey since the NSS from 2011. By extension, the country has not released any official estimates of poverty and inequality for over a decade now, according to the paper co-authored by economists Sutirtha Sinha Roy and Roy van der Weide.

Earlier, a working paper of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had said the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana (PMGKAY), which provides free foodgrains to the poor, played a key role in keeping extreme poverty in India at the lowest level of 0.8 per cent during the pandemic-hit 2020.