India moved an estimated 496 million people out of extreme poverty between 2011 and 2023, with the share of its population below the extreme poverty line falling from 27.1 per cent to 2.6 per cent. The finding comes from the World Bank’s October 2026 Poverty and Equity Brief, reported by NDTV and carried by Hiru News.
The World Bank described the fall as “one of the fastest poverty declines in the world”, and said India had improved on both monetary and non-monetary measures.
The numbers
- Extreme poverty: 27.1% of the population in 2011 → 2.6% in 2023.
- Lower-middle-income line (US$4.20 a day, 2021 purchasing power parity): 57.7% → 16.1%.
- Multidimensional poverty, measured by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative index: 53.8% in 2005-06 → 16.4% in 2019-21. The World Bank’s own multidimensional measure stood at 15.5% in 2022-23.
The Bank attributed the decline mainly to strong consumption growth, rising employment — particularly among women — and expanded social transfers including food subsidies.
It expects poverty to keep falling, but more slowly: at the US$4.20-a-day threshold, from 14.2 per cent in 2026 to 12.1 per cent by 2028. Those are described as indicative estimates based on microsimulations, which may change as new labour market and economic data arrive.
The less flattering half of the report
The same brief sets out where the progress stops.
Around 57 per cent of India’s poor remain concentrated in a single contiguous belt running from Uttar Pradesh to West Bengal, making employment in those states the decisive factor in any further reduction.
Employment grew by about 134 million people between 2017 and 2023 — nearly twice the growth of the working-age population — with much of the increase coming from rural women entering paid work. But youth unemployment rose, from 14.6 per cent to 15.9 per cent between the first quarters of FY26 and FY27, and most sharply among young rural women. Real earnings were broadly unchanged, and the employment growth was concentrated in relatively low-productivity work.
The World Bank also cautioned that its poverty estimates rest on household consumption surveys, and that some of the recent gains may reflect improved measurement as well as genuine improvements in welfare.
A note on the headline
Hiru’s English headline says poverty was “to end” for 496 million people. The report says no such thing: it says that many people moved above the extreme poverty line, which is a different and narrower claim. The 2.6 per cent who remain below it represent tens of millions of people.
Readers should also be careful comparing this with earlier World Bank figures. Previous briefs covering different periods and different poverty lines produced widely quoted numbers such as 171 million and 5.3 per cent. Those are not this report, and the figures are not interchangeable.
Two verified newsrooms. NDTV notes its account is published from a syndicated feed and was not edited by its staff beyond the headline.
