World Bank reports India lifted 496 million people from poverty between 2011 and 2023

The World Bank’s October 2026 Poverty and Equity Brief states that India reduced extreme poverty from 27.1 percent of the population in 2011 to 2.6 percent in 2023, lifting an estimated 496 million people above the $3.00-a-day line measured in 2021 purchasing-power-parity terms. Over the same period the share living below the lower-middle-income poverty line of $4.20 a day fell from 57.7 percent to 16.1 percent.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighted the findings on social media, describing the decline as historic and linking it to expanded opportunities. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman noted that sustained policy efforts under the present government have strengthened the foundations for inclusive growth. The report itself attributes the improvement to strong consumption growth, rising employment (particularly among women) and expanded social transfers, including food subsidies.

On multidimensional measures, poverty as tracked by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative fell from 53.8 percent in 2005-06 to 16.4 percent in 2019-21. The World Bank’s own multidimensional poverty metric stood at 15.5 percent in 2022-23. These non-monetary indicators capture access to education, health and basic services and show parallel progress.

The Bank projects that the $4.20-a-day poverty rate will continue to decline, from an estimated 14.2 percent in 2026 to 12.1 percent by 2028, though the pace is expected to slow. These projections rely on microsimulations and will be revised as fresh labour-market and macroeconomic data become available. The brief cautions that the estimates are indicative rather than definitive.

India’s reduction is described as one of the fastest recorded globally over the period examined. The absolute numbers involved are large because of the country’s population size. Residual poverty remains concentrated in certain states and among particular occupational groups, even as national averages have improved sharply. The report does not provide a detailed state-level breakdown in the summary released so far.

The findings arrive at a moment when opposition parties have focused on questions of electoral rolls and institutional integrity. Government supporters have pointed to the poverty numbers as evidence of economic delivery. Independent economists will examine the underlying household surveys and price deflators used by the Bank once the full technical annex is available. For now, the headline figures supply a concrete benchmark against which future consumption and employment data can be measured.

The period covered by the brief includes both the years before and after the Covid-19 pandemic. The sharp drop implies that recovery from the 2020-21 disruption was sufficiently broad to restore and then exceed earlier gains for large numbers of households. Continued monitoring of real wages and rural demand will test whether the trajectory holds.