Team Blitz India
US-BASED think tank Brookings has acknowledged that India has now officially eliminated ‘extreme poverty’ due to Prime Minister Narendra Modi government’s ‘strong policy thrust on redistribution’.
The report, authored by Surjit Bhalla and Karan Bhasin, said this was established by the sharp decline in headcount poverty ratio and stark increase in household consumption.
The internationally renowned economists credited this achievement to “strong inclusive growth in India over the last decade.”
The official consumption expenditure data for 2022-23, which was released recently, shows real per capita consumption growth at 2.9% per year since 2011-12.
Under this, rural growth at 3.1% was significantly higher than urban growth of 2.6%. The report is the ‘first official survey-based poverty estimates for India in over ten years.’
It said relatively higher consumption growth in rural areas should not come as a surprise given the “strong policy thrust on redistribution through a wide variety of publicly funded programmes.”
The data also presented an unprecedented decline in both urban and rural inequality. These two factors, i.e. high growth and large decline in inequality, have worked in combination to eliminate poverty in India for the Purchasing Power Parity USD 1.9 poverty line, as per Brookings.
The data show a strikingly lower number of poor people in India, at both thresholds, than those estimated by the World Bank.
Notably, these estimates do not take into account the free food (wheat and rice) supplied by the government to approximately two-thirds of the population, nor utilisation of public health and education, the think tank stated.
According to Brookings, measures like national mission for the construction of toilets and attempts to ensure universal access to electricity, modern cooking fuel, and, more recently, piped water, are among the policies that thrived consumption.
The rural access to piped water in India as of August 15, 2019 was 16.8% and at present it is 74.7%, which has significantly helped in the improvement of the general health of the public.
“Official data now confirms that India has eliminated extreme poverty, as commonly defined in international comparisons. This is an encouraging development with positive implications for global poverty headcount rates,” the Brookings report stated.
