India Lifted Nearly 500 Million People Out of Poverty Between 2011 and 2023, World Bank Report Says

India lifted nearly 500 million people out of poverty between 2011 and 2023, according to a World Bank report cited by Al Jazeera. The report says the share of Indians living in extreme poverty fell from 27.1 percent to 2.6 percent over that period.

Extreme poverty is the term for living below a very low income line. The World Bank measures it against an international threshold, so that figures can be compared across countries. Its estimates for India draw on newer household consumption surveys, which record what people spend, and apply the bank's own poverty thresholds.

India has not published an official consumption-based poverty estimate in more than a decade. That gap means the World Bank's comparable figures are the main recent measure of how poverty has changed.

India is the world's most populous country, with 1.4 billion people, and the fourth-largest economy by nominal gross domestic product, a measure of the total value of goods and services at current prices. The World Bank's India overview says the economy has nearly quadrupled in real terms since 2000, adjusted for inflation, and that income per person has almost tripled over the same period. India's share of the global economy doubled from 1.6 percent in 2000 to 3.4 percent in 2023.

The report also points to inequality. The top 1 percent of India's population owns 40 percent of the country's wealth, a concern the report highlights. Al Jazeera's coverage places India's progress alongside China, which lifted more than 800 million people out of extreme poverty over four decades.

Looking ahead, the World Bank's India overview states that India will need to sustain average annual growth of 7.8 percent over the next two decades to become a high-income economy by 2047. It also says the country needs to raise its real investment rate, the share of economic output put into long-term assets such as factories and infrastructure, from around 33.5 percent of GDP to 40 percent by 2035. The bank's Country Partnership Framework, its strategy document for work with India covering fiscal years 2026 to 2031, sets out these priorities. According to the overview, unlocking India's demographic dividend, the economic boost from a large working-age population, depends on raising female labour force participation from 35.6 percent to 50 percent by 2047.