New Delhi: According to the latest World Bank data, extreme poverty in India declined in 2021 – after a surge in 2019 and 2020 – but remained above the 2018 level.
While the pandemic resulted in an increase in poverty for most countries around the world, poverty in India was already showing an upward trend in 2019.
In 2018, 151.79 million Indians were categorised under this head which shot up to 176.09 million in 2019 – an increase of nearly 24 million. India’s poverty rate at 11.9% in 2021 also remained higher than the 2018 level of 11.09%, though easing from 14.72% in 2020, Businessline reported.
According to World Bank measures, the extreme poverty rate is set at $2.15 a day (approximately Rs 180) in purchasing power parity terms.
The global lender used data from the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey, conducted by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, to estimate poverty for India in the absence of Household Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES) data from the government since 2011-12, Businessline reported.
The results for 2022-23 and 2023-24 CES are likely to come only after the 2024 general elections, The Wire had reported. The findings of a similar exercise done by the government in 2017-2018 were withheld but the leaked data had shown a rise in poverty levels and a 45-year high in unemployment in 2018.
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Former member of the erstwhile Planning Commission N.C. Saxena said there were many reasons why poverty might have increased before the pandemic in 2018-19. “The government’s own 2017-18 consumption survey that it junked had shown that poverty increased in India. In the 2005-2015 period, there was a great deal of investment in construction, which declined after 2015. So, a large number of people who were involved in construction activity lost their jobs. The latest figures also show there has been no increase in real wages. The number of people who are in the workforce has also not increased significantly. Therefore, a large number of people are in the third category of ‘neither employed nor seeking employment’,” he told Businessline.
The World Bank also made a significant upward revision to its previous estimate of the number of people living in extreme poverty in 2019. The new estimate is 176.09 million, whereas the earlier estimate was 136.81 million.
This narrowed the gap with the 2020 figures to 29.5 million, implying that the pandemic had a smaller debilitating impact on poverty than previously thought.
Last year, the World Bank had said about 56 million Indians may have plunged into extreme poverty in 2020 as a result of the pandemic, increasing the global tally by 71 million and making it the worst year for poverty reduction since World War II, Businessline reported.