India pulled 500m people out of poverty. Many of them still barely survive

详细摘要

World Bank says India pulled a record number of citizens out of poverty, but millions of them still live on the edge.

Rajsamand and New Delhi, India – Hema Prajapat, 25, says even “thorns growing inside her stomach” would not hurt as much as hunger does.

By the end of each month, her kitchen shelves are empty; her husband, Hari Prajapat, sinks deeper into debt; and an increasing share of their food supplies is set aside for their nine-year-old son, Divyansh.

She spends 11,000 rupees ($117) a month on her household of three. That is about 49 percent more than the roughly 7,380 rupees ($78) monthly threshold for a family of that size, based on the World Bank’s poverty line.

India, the world’s most populous country, no longer counts its poor. It has not published an official consumption-based poverty estimate in more than a decade. That leaves the World Bank to provide internationally comparable estimates, using newer consumption surveys and its own poverty thresholds.

A recent World Bank report says India lifted nearly 500 million people out of poverty between 2011 and 2023, with extreme poverty dropping from 27.1 percent to 2.6 percent during the period.

The only comparable poverty-reduction effort on this scale was achieved by China, which lifted more than 800 million people out of extreme poverty over four decades.

Several economists have said India’s achievement is significant, and that the World Bank’s mechanism for calculating these numbers is beyond reproach, even as they have argued that the planet’s most populous nation still has a long way to go before it can claim to have defeated poverty.

Other economists have questioned the World Bank’s sweeping conclusions and India’s unwillingness under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to carry out its own poverty estimates.

But masked by that largely academic and political split is the lived reality of millions of Indians who have crossed the supposed poverty threshold yet lead a life marked by persistent deprivation, and a precarity that leaves families one shock away from losing everything that matters to them.

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