Extreme poverty in India fell from 27.1 percent in 2011 to 2.6 percent in 2023, according to the World Bank’s October 2026 Poverty and Equity Brief. The brief describes the fall as one of the fastest declines in the world. It measures extreme poverty at 3 dollars a day in 2021 purchasing power parity terms, which adjusts incomes for differences in the cost of living between countries.
At the broader lower-middle-income line of 4.20 dollars a day, the share of Indians below that line fell from 57.7 percent in 2011 to 16.1 percent in 2023. About 496 million people, or 49.6 crore, moved above that line during the period. The World Bank based the estimates on three official household surveys: the 2011-12 Consumer Expenditure Survey and the Household Consumption Expenditure Surveys of 2022-23 and 2023-24.
The brief gives three drivers for the change. Household consumption grew strongly, employment rose, and social transfers expanded, including food subsidies. Employment grew by about 134 million people between 2017 and 2023, nearly twice the growth in the working-age population. The brief notes that employment growth was strong among women, and it links that change to wider household earnings and spending.
How poverty fell between 2011 and 2023
Non-monetary measures moved in the same direction as the income figures. The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative’s Multidimensional Poverty Index fell from 53.8 percent in 2005-06 to 16.4 percent in 2019-21. The World Bank’s own multidimensional poverty measure stood at 15.5 percent in 2022-23. Those measures count deprivations in areas such as schooling, health and living standards, alongside income, so the fall points to gains beyond cash alone.
Consumption growth did much of the work in the brief’s account. As households spent more, more of them crossed the lines used in the study, and the effect showed up across the income distribution rather than in one group alone. Expanded social transfers, including food subsidies, added support at the lower end, while rising employment gave more households a wage income to spend. The brief presents those three forces together, not as separate stories, and it ties the pace of change to their combined effect over 12 years.
Poverty gaps that remain
The same brief records gaps that the headline fall does not remove. Median earnings among the top 10 percent of workers were about 13 times those of the bottom 10 percent in 2023. The brief put the Gini index at 23.0 in 2023, a measure of inequality in income or consumption. It also warned that household surveys may not fully capture consumption among wealthier households, and that the surveys could understate inequality for that reason.
Place still shapes the picture. At the 4.20 dollars a day line, the rate in 2023 stood at 19.3 percent among rural residents, compared with 8.6 percent in urban areas. Against a higher upper-middle-income line of 8.30 dollars a day, about 80 percent of India’s population remained below the line in 2023. The brief also cautioned that some recent gains may reflect improvements in measurement alongside genuine welfare improvements, so readers should not read every part of the fall as a change in living standards alone.
What the brief projects to 2028
The World Bank expects the decline to continue at a slower pace. At the 4.20 dollars a day line, the poverty rate is projected to fall from 14.2 percent in 2026 to 12.1 percent by 2028. The brief calls those projections indicative estimates based on microsimulations, which apply economic and labour market assumptions to household data. It says the figures will change as revised labour market and macroeconomic data become available, or as new survey findings arrive.
For readers following the numbers, the distinction between the two lines matters. Extreme deprivation at 3 dollars a day now touches a small share of the population, while the 4.20 dollars a day line still covers about one person in six. The brief’s message is therefore mixed: a large fall over 12 years, a slower fall ahead, and wide differences in earnings and in rural and urban outcomes that remain visible in the latest survey data.