Modi hails 'historic' poverty fall as World Bank data shows extreme poverty down to 2.6%

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has cited a World Bank report to argue that India has recorded one of the fastest declines in poverty anywhere in the world, describing the fall as a generational expansion of opportunity.

In a post on Instagram accompanied by the song Thaan Liya from the 2022 Hindi film Dasvi, Mr. Modi said the World Bank's findings showed that the share of Indians living in extreme poverty had fallen sharply over a 12-year period.

"India has recorded one of the fastest poverty declines in the world. This is what the World Bank is saying," the Prime Minister said in the post.

According to the World Bank's India Poverty and Equity Brief, India's extreme poverty rate fell from 27.1 per cent in 2011 to 2.6 per cent in 2023 — a decline of about 90 per cent, or from more than one in four Indians to roughly one in 38. The Bank's estimates use an extreme poverty line of $3 per day and a lower-middle-income threshold of $4.20 per day, both measured at 2021 purchasing power parity.

Citing the report, Mr. Modi said 49.6 crore people had moved out of poverty between 2011 and 2023. He also pointed to employment data, stating that employment grew by 13.4 crore in six years — nearly twice the increase in India's working-age population over the same period.

The Prime Minister further said inequality had narrowed, noting that India's Gini Index — the most widely used measure of income inequality — dropped by more than 20 per cent to 23.0. The World Bank report states that India made significant progress on both monetary and non-monetary measures of poverty over the past decade.

Mr. Modi used the occasion to draw a contrast with the Congress party's decades-old Garibi Hatao campaign, asserting that eradicating poverty had never been merely a slogan for his government but a sustained commitment. The remark is part of a long-running political argument between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress over the record of successive governments on welfare and deprivation.

Context on measurement

Poverty estimates for India are a subject of continuing debate among economists. The World Bank figures are modelled estimates drawn from household consumption surveys and converted using 2021 purchasing power parity. India's official poverty line has not been formally updated since the Rangarajan committee's recommendations in 2014, and researchers have disagreed for years over which threshold most accurately captures deprivation in a country of India's size and diversity.

Comparisons across time also depend on which survey rounds are used, and on how consumption data collected during and after the COVID-19 pandemic are treated. Readers should note that the World Bank's $3-per-day line is a global benchmark and is not the same as the poverty line used in Indian government schemes.

The Prime Minister's post did not address these methodological questions, and the report's authors present their findings as estimates rather than exact counts.

The track Mr. Modi used, Thaan Liya, sung by Sukhwinder Singh and Tanishkaa Sanghvi, is from a film about an incarcerated politician who decides to complete his school-leaving examinations — a storyline the song frames as a message of perseverance.

Official political reactions from opposition parties to the Prime Minister's post were not immediately available.