Poverty Rate in India 2026 – Introduction
Poverty is an issue that touches billions of people around the world, yet most of us rarely see what it actually looks like up close. India is one of the countries where that question matters most. It is home to more than 1.46 billion people, and for decades it carried the largest share of the world’s poor. That picture has changed quickly. Depending on which yardstick you use, India’s poverty rate today is either in the low single digits, in the teens, or somewhere in between, and understanding why the numbers differ so much is half the story.
This report brings together the latest figures from the World Bank, NITI Aayog, UNDP and OPHI, the Ministry of Statistics and the Ministry of Health. It covers the national picture, the state-by-state numbers, how poverty is measured, what is driving the decline, and where the gaps still are. Wherever a number comes with a caveat, we have said so.
Poverty in India 2026
The World Bank’s latest figures put extreme poverty in India at about 2.6%. Using its current international line of $3.00 a day (2021 prices), the Bank’s April 2026 Macro Poverty Outlook says extreme poverty fell from 27% in 2011 to 2.6% in 2023. Its Poverty and Inequality Platform, updated on 21 September 2026, shows a similar figure of 2.57% for 2023. The same outlook estimates the rate at 2.1% in 2024 and 1.5% in 2025, with a projection of 1.2% for 2026.
The picture looks different at higher lines. At the lower-middle-income line of $4.20 a day, which is the benchmark the Bank considers more relevant for a country like India, poverty fell from 58% in 2011 to 16% in 2023. That drop lifted nearly 500 million people out of poverty over twelve years. Even so, about 232.7 million people were still living on less than $4.20 a day in 2023.
It is worth noting that these numbers have moved a lot between releases. In June 2025 the World Bank estimated India’s extreme poverty at 5.3% for 2022-23 (roughly 75 million people), down from 27.1% in 2011-12, and said that 269 million people had moved out of extreme poverty in eleven years. The newer, lower estimate reflects the Bank’s later updates. The Bank itself has cautioned that the switch to India’s new household consumption survey changes the poverty trend on its own, so the drop is partly a measurement story and not only a real-world one. Independent economists have raised the same point.
On multidimensional poverty, India’s own government numbers tell a consistent story. According to NITI Aayog’s National Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) progress review, the share of Indians who are multidimensionally poor fell from 24.85% in 2015-16 to 14.96% in 2019-21. That is a drop of 9.89 percentage points, and it means roughly 135 million people escaped multidimensional poverty in five years. A later NITI Aayog discussion paper projected that the headcount ratio fell from 29.17% in 2013-14 to 11.28% in 2022-23, with about 24.82 crore (248 million) people leaving multidimensional poverty in nine years. Those later figures are projections and not survey results, so treat them accordingly.
The UN’s global index agrees on direction. The 2025 Global MPI from UNDP and OPHI reports that multidimensional poverty in India fell from 55.1% in 2005-06 to 16.4% in 2019-21, lifting about 414 million people out of poverty over roughly fifteen years. Earlier editions of the same report put that figure at 415 million. In 2005-06 around 645 million Indians were multidimensionally poor, a number that dropped to about 370 million in 2015-16 and about 230 million in 2019-21.
Progress has not been even. Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Rajasthan recorded the steepest declines in the number of poor people between 2015-16 and 2019-21. Bihar’s share of multidimensionally poor people fell from 51.89% to 33.76%, which means that where one in two people was poor in 2015-16, roughly one in three is today. Jharkhand fell from 42.10% to 28.81%, Uttar Pradesh from 37.68% to 22.93% and Madhya Pradesh from 36.57% to 20.63%.
One more thing has changed recently. The Ministry of Health released the sixth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-6, fieldwork 2023-24) on 29 May 2026. NITI Aayog’s state-level MPI has so far been built on NFHS-4 and NFHS-5, and a new edition using NFHS-6 had not been published at the time of writing. When it arrives, the state rankings in this report will likely shift.
What is Poverty?
Poverty can look like an unsolvable problem, but India’s record over the past two decades shows it is not. The government has rolled out a long list of schemes, and although poverty has not disappeared, it has fallen faster than most people expected. Let’s start with what the word actually means.
Poverty is a condition in which a person cannot afford basic needs such as food, shelter, clothing and safe drinking water. Someone who cannot meet those needs is considered to be living in poverty.
The official picture depends heavily on the definition. Under NITI Aayog’s multidimensional measure, about 15% of the population (roughly one in seven people) was poor in 2019-21. Under the World Bank’s $3.00 line, the share is under 3%. The two are not contradictory. One counts deprivation across health, education and living standards, and the other counts income or consumption.
What is Poverty Rate?
The poverty rate is the share of a population whose income, consumption or living conditions fall below an agreed threshold. That threshold can be a monetary poverty line, such as a set number of dollars per day, or a composite index that scores households on deprivations like nutrition, schooling, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and cooking fuel.
NITI Aayog’s Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) Report 2026
NITI Aayog’s second national MPI report, the Progress Review 2023, released in July 2023, is still the most detailed official source on state and district poverty in India. It found that 13.5 crore Indians moved out of multidimensional poverty between 2015-16 and 2019-21. Poverty in rural areas fell fastest, from 32.59% to 19.28%, while urban poverty dropped from 8.65% to 5.27%.
The National MPI measures deprivation across health, education and standard of living using 12 indicators aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals. The Global MPI uses 10 of those, and India’s version adds maternal health and bank accounts. Each dimension carries an equal weight of one third, and a person counts as poor if they are deprived in at least one third of the weighted indicators.
Over five years, India’s MPI value roughly halved, from 0.117 to 0.066, and the intensity of poverty, which measures how deprived the poor are on average, slipped from 47.14% to 44.39%. That puts India well ahead of the pace needed for SDG target 1.2, which calls for cutting multidimensional poverty at least in half by 2030.
The report links the improvement to sharp gains in sanitation, cooking fuel, nutrition and years of schooling. Deprivation in sanitation fell by 21.8 percentage points, and cooking fuel by 14.6 points, the two biggest drops. All 12 indicators improved.
At state level, Uttar Pradesh saw the largest absolute fall in the number of poor people, with 3.43 crore people escaping multidimensional poverty. Bihar followed with 2.25 crore and Madhya Pradesh with 1.36 crore.
In 2015-16 only seven states had less than 10% of their population living in multidimensional poverty: Mizoram, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Goa and Kerala. By 2019-21 that number had doubled to 14, with Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Manipur and Uttarakhand joining the list. Their falls were steep. Telangana went from 13.18% to 5.88%, Andhra Pradesh from 11.77% to 6.06%, Haryana from 11.88% to 7.07%, Karnataka from 12.77% to 7.58%, Maharashtra from 14.80% to 7.81%, Manipur from 16.96% to 8.10% and Uttarakhand from 17.67% to 9.67%.
Apart from Bihar, no other state has more than one third of its people living in multidimensional poverty. Bihar remains the outlier and the main challenge for the national numbers.
NITI Aayog also notes a limit on its own findings. More than 70% of the NFHS-5 data was collected before the COVID-19 pandemic, so the 2019-21 numbers may not fully reflect what the pandemic did to households.
Poverty in India
Poverty in India used to be a story about scale. The country had more extreme poor people than anywhere else on earth. According to the World Bank, the absolute number of extreme poor in India rose until the 2000s, peaking around 530 million, before falling sharply. India’s share of the world’s extreme poor dropped from roughly 27% in the 2000s to about 9% by 2022.
The World Bank’s mid-2025 update also found that, for the first time, India’s extreme poverty rate had dropped below the global average. The Bank puts the number of people living on less than $3.00 a day worldwide at about 811 million in 2026 (an estimate, as figures after 2024 are nowcasts). India’s own share of that total is now small.
Government spending on welfare schemes has played a big part. Programs covering housing, cooking gas, toilets, piped water, bank accounts and food security have reached tens of crores of households, and the drop in multidimensional poverty is concentrated in exactly those areas.
The country’s growth has helped too. India’s economy grew 7.6% in FY26, and the World Bank expects growth to slow to 6.6% in FY27 because of higher oil, gas and fertilizer prices linked to the conflict in the Middle East. Inflation averaged just 1.9% between April 2025 and February 2026, which helped household budgets. The Bank projects that the share of Indians living on less than $4.20 a day will keep falling, to 8.9% in 2026.
Meaning of Extreme Poverty
Extreme poverty describes people living on less than the international extreme poverty line, currently $3.00 per person per day in 2021 prices. That is the amount the World Bank considers a bare minimum for survival, and it reflects the national poverty lines of the world’s poorest countries. Before June 2025 the line was $2.15 a day in 2017 prices, and before that $1.90 a day in 2011 prices. In practical terms, extreme poverty means going without reliable food, shelter, safe water or health care, and often carrying debt taken on for medical costs.
India Poverty Statistics 2026
| Indicator | Latest Figure |
|---|---|
| Total population (2025) | 1,463.9 million |
| Extreme poverty rate, $3.00/day (2023) | 2.6% |
| Extreme poverty nowcast (2024 / 2025) | 2.1% / 1.5% |
| Poverty rate, $4.20/day (2023) | 16.1% |
| People below $4.20/day (2023) | 232.7 million |
| Poverty rate, $8.30/day (2023) | 80.0% |
| Multidimensional poverty, NITI Aayog (2019-21) | 14.96% |
| Multidimensional poverty, Global MPI (2019-21) | 16.4% |
| Consumption Gini index (2023) | 23.0 |
According to the World Bank, extreme poverty in India is now around 2.6%, which means only a few crore people fall below the $3.00 line. At the lower-middle-income line the number is far larger, at about 232.7 million people. The gap between those two figures shows that a very large group of people has escaped the worst deprivation but still lives with very little financial cushion.
The World Bank also notes that poverty is concentrated. About 43% of India’s poor live in three of the most populous states: Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Bihar. Employment quality remains a weak spot. Only 23% of workers held salaried jobs as of 2023.
Poverty in India – Poverty Projections by Income Line
| Year | $3.00/day | $4.20/day | $8.30/day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 (actual) | 2.6% | 16.1% | 80.0% |
| 2024 (nowcast) | 2.1% | 13.8% | 77.7% |
| 2025 (nowcast) | 1.5% | 11.1% | 74.2% |
| 2026 (forecast) | 1.2% | 8.9% | 70.7% |
| 2027 (forecast) | 0.8% | 6.8% | 66.5% |
| 2028 (forecast) | 0.6% | 5.3% | 62.2% |
Source: World Bank Macro Poverty Outlook for India, April 2026.
The forecasts assume that growth continues and that the Middle East conflict does not push energy prices high enough to hurt household spending for long. The Bank names higher oil prices, lower remittances from the Gulf and rising subsidy costs as the main risks. It also points to new labor codes, a proposed national wage floor and planned changes to the rural employment guarantee program as policy shifts that will play out over time.
The upper-middle-income column is a useful reminder. Even as extreme poverty fades, about 80% of Indians in 2023 lived on less than $8.30 a day, the line the Bank uses for countries at the next income level up. India has cut extreme deprivation faster than it has raised general living standards.
Poverty in India – What People Are Deprived Of
Instead of an age-group breakdown, the most useful current data on who is poor comes from the 12 indicators NITI Aayog tracks. The table below shows the share of India’s population that was deprived in each indicator in 2019-21, and how much each indicator contributes to the national MPI score.
| Indicator | Population Deprived (2019-21) | Contribution to MPI |
|---|---|---|
| Nutrition | 31.52% | 29.86% |
| Child and adolescent mortality | 2.06% | 1.48% |
| Maternal health | 19.17% | 11.73% |
| Years of schooling | 11.40% | 16.65% |
| School attendance | 5.27% | 9.10% |
| Cooking fuel | 43.90% | 8.82% |
| Sanitation | 30.13% | 6.63% |
| Drinking water | 7.32% | 1.60% |
| Electricity | 3.27% | 1.32% |
| Housing | 41.37% | 8.65% |
| Assets | 10.16% | 3.39% |
| Bank account | 3.69% | 0.78% |
Source: NITI Aayog, National MPI: A Progress Review 2023 (NFHS-5, 2019-21).
Nutrition is the biggest single driver of multidimensional poverty, accounting for nearly 30% of the national MPI score, which is close to a third of the whole thing. Cooking fuel and housing show the highest raw deprivation rates, at 43.90% and 41.37%. Years of schooling contributes more to the MPI than its raw deprivation rate suggests because of its weight in the index.
The Global MPI 2025 report echoes this. It lists lack of clean cooking fuel, inadequate housing and poor sanitation among the most common deprivations among India’s poor, and it flags child poverty in nutrition and sanitation as a lingering problem.
Prosperous State of India
Below are the Indian states with the lowest multidimensional poverty.
- Kerala
- Goa
- Tamil Nadu
- Sikkim
- Punjab
Kerala has the lowest poverty in India, with just 0.55% of its population classified as multidimensionally poor in 2019-21, down from 0.70% in 2015-16. Kerala is followed by Goa (0.84%), Tamil Nadu (2.20%), Sikkim (2.60%) and Punjab (4.75%).
Among union territories, Puducherry (0.85%) and Lakshadweep (1.11%) also record very low numbers.
Kerala also made headlines on 1 November 2025, when the state government declared Kerala the first Indian state free of extreme poverty. The state’s Extreme Poverty Eradication Project, launched in 2021, identified 64,006 families through ground-level surveys that looked at food, health, livelihood and shelter. Each family received an individual micro-plan. The state reported providing homes to 3,913 families, land to 1,338 families and repair assistance to 5,651 families, and it helped more than 21,000 people without identity documents get them. Kerala’s method differs from the World Bank line and from NITI Aayog’s MPI, and some scholars and activists have questioned how the label should be read, so it is best seen as a state-level milestone under Kerala’s own definition.
Poorest State in India
Below are the Indian states with the highest multidimensional poverty.
- Bihar
- Jharkhand
- Meghalaya
- Uttar Pradesh
- Madhya Pradesh
Bihar is still the poorest state in India. Under NITI Aayog’s latest state-level MPI (NFHS-5, 2019-21), 33.76% of Bihar’s population is multidimensionally poor. Jharkhand follows at 28.81%, then Meghalaya (27.79%), Uttar Pradesh (22.93%) and Madhya Pradesh (20.63%). Assam is close behind at 19.35%.
Compared with the 2015-16 baseline, that is a big improvement for almost every state on the list. Bihar’s rate was 51.89%, Jharkhand’s 42.10%, Uttar Pradesh’s 37.68% and Madhya Pradesh’s 36.57%. Meghalaya moved the least among the five, falling from 32.54% to 27.79%, and has moved up the ranking as the others improved.
Poverty in India State wise
| State / Union Territory | MPI Headcount Ratio 2015-16 (%) | MPI Headcount Ratio 2019-21 (%) |
|---|---|---|
| Andaman and Nicobar Islands | 4.29 | 2.30 |
| Andhra Pradesh | 11.77 | 6.06 |
| Arunachal Pradesh | 24.23 | 13.76 |
| Assam | 32.65 | 19.35 |
| Bihar | 51.89 | 33.76 |
| Chandigarh | 5.97 | 3.52 |
| Chhattisgarh | 29.90 | 16.37 |
| Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu | 19.58 | 9.21 |
| Delhi | 4.44 | 3.43 |
| Goa | 3.76 | 0.84 |
| Gujarat | 18.47 | 11.66 |
| Haryana | 11.88 | 7.07 |
| Himachal Pradesh | 7.59 | 4.93 |
| Jammu and Kashmir | 12.56 | 4.80 |
| Jharkhand | 42.10 | 28.81 |
| Karnataka | 12.77 | 7.58 |
| Kerala | 0.70 | 0.55 |
| Ladakh | 12.70 | 3.53 |
| Lakshadweep | 1.82 | 1.11 |
| Madhya Pradesh | 36.57 | 20.63 |
| Maharashtra | 14.80 | 7.81 |
| Manipur | 16.96 | 8.10 |
| Meghalaya | 32.54 | 27.79 |
| Mizoram | 9.78 | 5.30 |
| Nagaland | 25.16 | 15.43 |
| Odisha | 29.34 | 15.68 |
| Puducherry | 1.71 | 0.85 |
| Punjab | 5.57 | 4.75 |
| Rajasthan | 28.86 | 15.31 |
| Sikkim | 3.82 | 2.60 |
| Tamil Nadu | 4.76 | 2.20 |
| Telangana | 13.18 | 5.88 |
| Tripura | 16.62 | 13.11 |
| Uttar Pradesh | 37.68 | 22.93 |
| Uttarakhand | 17.67 | 9.67 |
| West Bengal | 21.29 | 11.89 |
Source: NITI Aayog, National MPI: A Progress Review 2023. NFHS-4 (2015-16) figures use the updated definitions applied in the 2023 review.
Two things stand out in the table. First, the very biggest absolute gains came in the poorest states. Bihar fell 18.13 percentage points, Madhya Pradesh 15.94 and Uttar Pradesh 14.75. Second, some of the richer states barely moved because they had little room left to fall. Kerala improved by 0.15 points and Punjab by 0.82.
Measuring Poverty in India
Global Multidimensional Poverty Index – India
The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index was launched in 2010 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). Each year it measures the overlapping deprivations poor people face and tracks how they change over time. India is one of the countries that has halved its Global MPI value. Between 2005-06 and 2019-21, about 414 million Indians moved out of multidimensional poverty, the largest fall recorded for any country in the index.
The 2025 edition, titled Overlapping Hardships: Poverty and Climate Hazards, covers 109 countries and 6.3 billion people, of whom 1.1 billion live in acute multidimensional poverty. It also overlays climate exposure on the poverty map for the first time. India’s MPI value in that edition is 0.069, with a headcount ratio of 16.4% for 2019-21. A big caveat applies. Because the Global MPI for India relies on NFHS-5 fieldwork from 2019-21, the numbers do not yet reflect the NFHS-6 survey.
The Global MPI tracks deprivation across three dimensions and ten indicators:
- Health, covering nutrition and child mortality (1/6 weight each, 1/3 in total);
- Education, covering years of schooling and school attendance (1/6 weight each, 1/3 in total);
- Standard of living, covering cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and assets (1/3 in total).
What is Poverty Line?
A poverty line is a threshold of income or consumption below which a person is counted as poor. It is the oldest way of measuring poverty and still the one most people mean when they ask for the poverty rate.
India last published an official poverty estimate built on a national poverty line for 2011-12, when the Tendulkar line put the poverty ratio at about 21.9%. The World Bank’s platform still lists the national-poverty-line rate for India as not available. Since then, the government has relied on multidimensional measures for its headline numbers, while the Bank, think tanks and banks produce their own monetary estimates from the consumption surveys.
Those surveys are the key to the recent debate. The Ministry of Statistics ran two consecutive Household Consumption Expenditure Surveys (HCES) in 2022-23 and 2023-24, the first full round in eleven years. Average monthly per capita consumption expenditure (MPCE) in 2023-24 came in at Rs 4,122 in rural India and Rs 6,996 in urban India, up about 9% and 8% on the year before. The gap between urban and rural spending narrowed to about 70% from 84% in 2011-12, and consumption inequality dropped, with the rural Gini falling from 0.266 to 0.237 and the urban Gini from 0.314 to 0.284.
Poverty Line in India
The most widely quoted official lines for India come from the 2011-12 expert committees. The Tendulkar line stood at Rs 816 per person per month in rural areas and Rs 1,000 in urban areas. The Rangarajan committee later proposed higher lines of Rs 972 for rural areas and Rs 1,407 for urban areas. People who spent above these levels were counted as “above the poverty line” and those below as “below the poverty line”.
Those numbers are more than a decade old, and they are far below today’s average spending. With rural MPCE at Rs 4,122 and urban MPCE at Rs 6,996 in 2023-24, the old lines no longer describe a realistic minimum for daily life, which is one reason researchers keep asking for a refreshed national poverty line.
Official Release of Poverty Line Estimates
The Planning Commission used to release poverty estimates, expressed as the number of people below the poverty line as a share of the population, for 1973-74, 1977-78, 1983, 1987-88, 1993-94, 1999-2000, 2004-05, 2009-10 and 2011-12. Its last release, in July 2013, was based on the Tendulkar line for 2011-12. Consumption surveys were then collected only at long intervals, and the long gap after 2011-12 is why so many independent estimates, ranging from about 2.5% to 29.5% depending on the source and year, have circulated in the meantime.
An SBI Research report published in June 2025 estimated that India’s poverty rate fell to about 4.6% in 2024, from the World Bank’s 5.3% for 2023. SBI noted that its figures and the Bank’s were close once the two were adjusted for differences in method and definitions.
Poverty Percentage in India
- According to the World Bank, 2.6% of Indians lived on less than $3.00 a day in 2023, and 16.1% lived on less than $4.20 a day.
- According to NITI Aayog’s National MPI, 14.96% of the population was multidimensionally poor in 2019-21, and its later projection puts the figure at 11.28% for 2022-23.
- According to the 2025 Global MPI, 16.4% of Indians were multidimensionally poor in 2019-21, down from 55.1% in 2005-06.
World Bank Poverty Line
In June 2025 the World Bank updated its global poverty lines to reflect 2021 purchasing power parity prices. The extreme poverty line rose from $2.15 a day (2017 prices) to $3.00 a day (2021 prices). At the same time, the lower-middle-income line moved to $4.20 and the upper-middle-income line to $8.30. The revision initially added about 226 million people to the global count of the extreme poor. India’s own new consumption data then pulled the global count back down by about 125 million.
For a country like India, the lower-middle-income line is usually considered the most meaningful. At $4.20, India’s poverty rate fell from 58% in 2011 to 16% in 2023. Rural poverty at that line dropped from 65% to 19%, and urban poverty from 40% to 8.6%. That is still a large gap between the two, and it shows that rural India remains the core of the poverty challenge.
The Bank also tracks its own multidimensional poverty measure, which combines monetary poverty with deprivations in education and basic infrastructure. The Bank’s Poverty and Equity Brief puts India’s headcount on that measure at 15.5% for 2022-23, down from 53.8% in 2005-06.
International Poverty Line
The international poverty line is set by the World Bank so that poverty can be compared across countries. It is drawn from the median national poverty line in the world’s poorest countries. It is not designed to be a national poverty line for India, and the Bank explicitly discourages using it to assess national trends for middle-income countries. That is the main reason two credible sources can give such different answers for India in the same year.
The Bank’s consumption-based Gini index for India was 23.0 in 2023, a low figure that reflects how household consumption surveys are collected and does not capture wealth or top incomes. Other measures, such as the World Inequality Database, point to much higher inequality at the top of the income distribution.
World Poverty Clock (WPC)
The World Poverty Clock, run by World Data Lab, is a model that tracks poverty in real time up to 2030 for nearly every country. It is built from publicly available data on income distribution, production and consumption, and it fills the gaps between large household surveys and censuses. It is used to monitor progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals.
The clock’s India numbers have followed the same downward path as the World Bank’s. Earlier versions of the tool, which used the old $2.15 line, put India’s extreme poverty at about 2.4%, or roughly 3.4 crore people, for 2024. Because the clock’s numbers shift with each data update and depend on which line is used, we recommend checking its live counter for the most current reading and treating the World Bank’s official series as the reference point for published statistics.
Causes of Poverty in India
There are many causes of poverty in India
- Famines and food insecurity
- Malnutrition
- Limited schooling and low skills
- Unemployment and low-quality jobs, with only 23% of workers in salaried jobs
- Slow growth in agriculture, which grew just 2.4% in FY26
- Unequal distribution of land and resources
- Uneven implementation of welfare schemes
- Farm debt and indebtedness from medical costs
- Climate hazards such as heatwaves, floods and air pollution
The causes are layered. Colonial-era policies, land ownership patterns and caste-based discrimination shaped who had access to assets and opportunities for generations, and those effects have faded far more slowly than the poverty statistics. Education and health gaps hold families back, and low-productivity jobs keep incomes low even for people who work full time.
Newer risks are joining the old ones. The 2025 Global MPI highlights how poor households are exposed to heat, flooding and air pollution, which raise the odds that a shock pushes a family back into poverty. The World Bank also warns that India’s dependence on imported energy and on remittances from the Gulf leaves poor and near-poor households exposed if oil prices stay high or if remittances fall.
Many households sit close to the poverty threshold. That means families just above it can slip back with one bad harvest, one medical bill or one lost job, which is why security matters as much as income.
Poverty Alleviation Programs in India
India’s poverty reduction has been driven by a mix of economic growth and targeted programs. After independence, the government subsidized food through ration cards, expanded access to credit, invested in education, promoted better farming methods and rolled out family planning. Those measures helped eliminate large-scale famine and gradually lowered hunger and illiteracy. The steepest declines came after 1991, when faster economic growth began to pull large numbers of households above the poverty line.
More recent programs have focused on the basic deprivations that the MPI measures. NITI Aayog and UNDP credit the following for much of the improvement between 2015-16 and 2019-21:
- Swachh Bharat Mission for toilets and sanitation
- Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana for clean cooking fuel
- Jal Jeevan Mission for piped drinking water
- Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana for housing
- Saubhagya for household electricity
- Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana for bank accounts
- Poshan Abhiyaan for nutrition
- Samagra Shiksha for school education
- Ayushman Bharat for health coverage
MGNREGA, started in 2005, guarantees up to 100 days of wage employment per rural household and remains the country’s largest rural safety net. The Ministry of Rural Development’s other programs, including NRLM, PMAY and DDU-GKY, target livelihoods, housing and skills. The World Bank’s 2026 outlook notes that changes to the rural employment guarantee program are planned, along with new labor codes that aim to improve worker welfare, encourage formal jobs and set a national wage floor. The effects of those changes will only become clear over the next few years.
Growth remains the biggest lever. India’s economy has roughly quadrupled in size over the last two decades, real per capita income has tripled, and the World Bank expects the poverty rate at the lower-middle-income line to keep falling as long as growth holds. The near-term risk is energy. Higher oil, gas and fertilizer prices tied to the Middle East conflict could squeeze household budgets and raise subsidy bills, so the pace of poverty reduction in 2026 and 2027 depends partly on how long that disruption lasts. Even so, ending extreme poverty by 2030, the target of Sustainable Development Goal 1, looks within reach on the World Bank’s current numbers.
(Sources: World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform, September 2026 update; World Bank Macro Poverty Outlook for India, April 2026; NITI Aayog, National Multidimensional Poverty Index: A Progress Review 2023 and discussion paper on multidimensional poverty since 2005-06; UNDP and OPHI, Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2025; Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Household Consumption Expenditure Survey 2023-24; Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, NFHS-6; SBI Research, June 2025; Government of Kerala, Extreme Poverty Eradication Project.)
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Disclaimer: The data research report we present here is based on information found from various sources on the internet. We are not liable for any financial loss, errors, or damages of any kind that may result from the use of the information herein. We acknowledge that though we try to report accurately, we cannot verify the absolute facts of everything that has been represented.
