How India pulled 500 million people out of poverty, as inequality deepens

What the report says

Al Jazeera reports that India has cut extreme poverty sharply over the past decade, with the World Bank estimating that the rate fell from 27.1 percent in 2011 to 2.6 percent in 2023. Using government household survey data, the bank said about 496 million people moved above the lower middle-income poverty line during that period, a decline the publication describes as among the fastest in the world. The story is based in Bengaluru and places the findings in the context of India’s 1.4 billion population and its long-running economic expansion since the early 1990s.

The report says the progress was driven by a mix of stronger consumption, more employment — especially for women — and wider social transfers. It points to successive welfare policies, including rural work guarantees, direct cash transfers, free food grains, housing support, expanded sanitation and broader access to piped water, as factors that may have helped households move out of extreme deprivation. Al Jazeera also notes that the World Bank expects poverty to keep declining, though more gradually, through 2028.

At the same time, the article says inequality in India remains very high and has widened since liberalization, according to the 2026 World Inequality Report. Economists quoted in the piece argue that India’s absolute number of poor people remains large because of its huge population, and some question the sustainability of large-scale food subsidies and the government’s reliance on World Bank estimates rather than its own poverty line. The report frames India’s poverty reduction as a major achievement, but one that sits alongside persistent economic and social disparities.