Covid pushed 7 crore into poverty in 2020, says World Bank

New Delhi, October 6

The number of people living below the extreme poverty line rose by over seven crore in 2020, which is the largest annual increase since global poverty monitoring began in 1990, said a World Bank report.

Ukraine fallout

• By 2015, the global extreme poverty rate worldwide had been cut by more than half
•  and the global goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030 would not be achieved, it said

Previous estimates had suggested a poverty headcount rate of 10.4 per cent in 2017 and the latest estimate based on paper by Sinha Roy and van der Weide shows that poverty was 13.6 per cent in 2020, said World Bank report “Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2022: Correcting Course”.

“The most recent survey data released by the National Sample Survey Office of India used to measure poverty is the 2011/12 National Sample Survey (NSS). The government decided not to release the 2017/18 NSS round because of concerns about data quality,” it stated.

Poverty has gone up in India too. The World Bank has also banked on data from the private Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) as there are no official estimates of poverty since 2011. “Because of India’s size, the lack of recent survey data for the country significantly affects the measurement of global poverty, as was evident in Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020,” noted the report.