The World Bank documented that extreme poverty in India fell from 27.1% to 2.6% of the population between 2011 and 2023, a decline the body described as one of the fastest in the world. The October 2026 Poverty and Equity Brief estimates that 496 million people rose above poverty as measured by the 4.20 dollars per day line.
The reduction rested on three drivers the report identifies: consumption growth, rising employment, especially among rural women, and the expansion of social transfers, including food subsidies. Al Jazeera reported on November 3 that, despite the progress, income and wealth inequality have widened since the economic opening of the 1990s. For Mexico and Latin America the case matters because it separates two variables that social policy often treats together: household monetary income and the distribution of aggregate income, an axis present in the design of conditional transfers in the region.
The brief breaks the result down by poverty lines. With the 4.20 dollars per day line, the share fell from 57.7% to 16.1%; with the 3 dollars line, 75.2 million people remained below it in 2023. The income gap also appears in the document: the median of the top 10% of earners is about 13 times that of the bottom 10%, and rural poverty, at 19.3%, is more than double urban poverty, at 8.6%. The report, coordinated by World Bank economist Ayago Wambile, adds that employment grew by about 134 million jobs between 2017 and 2023, although real incomes remained practically unchanged and youth unemployment rose from 14.6% to 15.9%.
The World Bank projection points to poverty at the 4.20 dollars line falling from 14.2% in 2026 to 12.1% in 2028, a microsimulation estimate subject to revision. India's next consumption survey and the updated brief will show whether the pattern holds: less extreme poverty with income concentration in parallel.
This note was drafted with artificial intelligence assistance from verified sources and reviewed by a human editor before publication.