New Delhi, Nov 12 — India and Pakistan present two contrasting cases in the fight to eradicate poverty. While India made eliminating poverty the central purpose of its economic policy, neighbouring Pakistan considered the issue a residual concern to be addressed once more powerful institutional interests in Islamabad have been satisfied, according to an article in European Times.
The result is that while “India produced one of the fastest declines in extreme poverty ever recorded, Pakistan has produced the opposite result and has reversed course, leaving it alone among the larger economies of South Asia,” the article states.
It cites the World Bank’s ‘Poverty and Equity Brief,’ released this month, which records India’s extreme poverty falling from 27.1 per cent in 2011 to 2.6 per cent in 2023 on the $3-a-day line, with roughly 496 million people lifted above it over 12 years. These are not a government’s claims about itself but the assessment of the institution whose figures Islamabad cites when they suit it.
The report attributes the sharp decline in India’s poverty to the expansion in employment in the country by about 134 million between 2017 and 2023, close to twice the growth of the working-age population, with rural women entering paid work in unprecedented numbers. Food transfers were extended to most of the population, and the delivery architecture built around Aadhaar identification and direct bank transfers cut out intermediaries, saving an estimated Rs 3.48 lakh crore in leakage by 2024.
Over the same period, Pakistan moved in the opposite direction. The World Bank report shows that extreme poverty in the country at the $3 line rose from 16.5 per cent in 2018-19 to 23.0 per cent by 2024, an increase of 6.4 percentage points, that represents a relative jump of close to 40 per cent and leaves roughly 58 million people below the line.
Pakistan’s Planning Ministry’s national poverty rate rose from 21.9 per cent to 28.9 per cent. Inequality widened alongside it, with the 'Gini coefficient' rising from 28.4 to 32.7, meaning the adjustment fell hardest on households with the least to give.
Pakistan now accounts for about 48 per cent of the extreme poor across the World Bank’s Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan region while holding under a third of its population, and its poverty rate runs at roughly 1.6 times the regional average, the report added.