Al Jazeera analysis
The World Bank says India has lifted about 500 million people above the poverty line. The reality is grim. Hundreds of millions of people who are free of poverty on paper are still fighting simply to survive, an Al Jazeera report finds. One illness or any small setback would leave them destitute again.
The life of Hema Prajapat, a 25-year-old homemaker in Rajasthan, shows it. In her words, the pain of hunger is worse than a thorn piercing the stomach. At the end of every month the pots in her kitchen are empty. Her husband, Hari Prajapat, is sinking into debt. Most of what food there is at home is set aside for their only son, nine-year-old Divyansh. Yet by the World Bank’s count, Hema’s family is no longer poor: the household of three spends 11,000 rupees a month, about half as much again as the World Bank’s poverty line.
India is the world’s most populous country, yet for more than a decade it has published no official estimate of poverty of its own. That leaves the World Bank’s figures. By its count, extreme poverty in India fell from 27 percent to just 2.5 percent between 2011 and 2023. Before that, only China had set such a record, lifting 800 million people out of poverty over four decades.
Many have praised India’s achievement, but a large group of economists question it. The Narendra Modi government is also criticised for not carrying out a poverty survey of its own. Hema, who works as a gardener and in other people’s homes, says angrily that the line used to measure poverty is set so low that nobody can live with dignity on that money. She asks whether the people who wrote the report ever stepped out of their air-conditioned cars to see how the poor live.
In India, the world’s fourth-largest economy, the gap between rich and poor is vast. The richest 1 percent hold 40 percent of the country’s wealth. The want shows in Hema’s household too. She was married at just 11 into a family of potters. When selling clay pots could no longer support the family, her husband began selling phuchka on the street, but the Covid shock shut that business down too. Hema was forced to wash dishes and mop floors in other people’s homes for 5,000 rupees a month. It is still not enough. Prices in India have risen by at least 51 percent in the past nine years, but the incomes of the poor have not. The government gives free rice and lentils, but ordinary people struggle to meet the other costs.
Afraid of the crowds and long queues at government hospitals, people are driven to private clinics, which ruin them. Two months ago, when her son had a fever, a private hospital cost Hema 6,000 rupees, more than a whole month’s income. Her neighbour, Sushila Salvi, is worse off. Pregnant for the second time after 14 years, she spent all 65,000 rupees of her savings on treatment at a private clinic. For lack of money, she has now had to stop her elder daughter’s private tuition.
Development economist Santosh Mehrotra says the poverty line the World Bank has set, without separating the costs of village and city, is not realistic at all. In his view, a single shock, a flood, a drought, an epidemic or the cost of a wedding in the family, can push these families back into the darkness of extreme poverty.
The story of Seema Kumar, 37, who lives on the outskirts of New Delhi, is the same. She spends 20,000 rupees a month and still has to borrow when a festival comes. Recently, when smoke from Diwali fireworks made Delhi’s air toxic, her whole family fell ill. Seema says with regret that she did not even have the money to buy a simple mask for her son, yet on paper she is no longer called poor.
With fuel prices up because of the war in the Middle East, Hema’s husband is now afraid even to fill his motorcycle with petrol. Hema herself has to find the fuel money to take her son to hospital. She has one dream: that her son grows up to be a decent person. Her fear is that if she misses work for even a single day, let alone a month, the whole family will go back to the days of going without food.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report