India needs at least 10 years of high economic growth to fight poverty

LAST week, India passed an important milestone that will have far-reaching consequences on its standard of living and may be a major factor in next year's crucial elections where Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies will seek to win a second term.

Brookings Institute, which designed the World Poverty Clock, said in a blog post that India is no longer home to the world's largest population of people living in extreme poverty - living on less than US$1.90 a day - with Nigeria taking the mantle for this dubious distinction. India now has 73 million people, around 5.5 per cent of its population, living in extreme poverty compared to 87 million in Nigeria, which represents almost half the African country's population.

The Brookings data suggests that every minute, 44 Indians are coming out of extreme poverty while in Nigeria, six people per minute are falling into the abject poor category. If present trends continue, India could drop to No 3 on that list later this year, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo taking the No 2 spot. The fall in Indian poverty has been quite dramatic. In 2012, according to World Bank data, India had 265 million people living in extreme poverty. In 2015, that figure fell to 172 million.