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496 million or 25 crore? Making sense of India’s poverty numbers

Published 6 November 2026

Two numbers about poverty in India get quoted a lot, and they seem to contradict each other. The World Bank says 496 million people moved out of poverty between 2011 and 2023. NITI Aayog says about 25 crore (248 million) people escaped multidimensional poverty between 2013-14 and 2022-23. If you subtract one from the other, you get roughly 25 crore people who must have escaped poverty between 2011 and 2014, before the Modi government took office. That does not make sense. Here is why the subtraction is wrong, and what each number actually means.

Two different rulers

The two numbers measure different things.

The World Bank’s 496 million counts people who crossed the $4.20 a day consumption line, the poverty line for lower-middle-income countries. It is a money measure: how much a household spends. The World Bank’s India Poverty and Equity Brief (October 2026) reports that the share of Indians below that line fell from 57.7 percent in 2011-12 to 16.1 percent in 2023-24.

NITI Aayog’s 25 crore counts people who escaped multidimensional poverty. Its National Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) does not look at income at all. It looks at deprivation across health, education, and living standards, using 12 indicators that include nutrition, child mortality, years of schooling, cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, and having a bank account. The MPI headcount fell from 29.17 percent in 2013-14 to 11.28 percent in 2022-23.

A person can be above $4.20 a day and still be multidimensionally poor (for instance, with no sanitation), or the other way around. So you cannot subtract a multidimensional count from a consumption count. They are not two halves of one total.

The windows overlap

There is a second problem with the subtraction. The two windows almost entirely overlap. The World Bank’s window is 2011 to 2023. NITI Aayog’s window is 2013-14 to 2022-23, which sits almost entirely inside it. So the 25 crore is not the “Modi portion” of the 496 million. It is a separate measurement of (mostly) the same years.

The two sources actually agree

When you compare like with like, the two sources land in the same place. The World Bank’s own extreme-poverty figure, measured at $3 a day, is 269 million people out of extreme poverty between 2011-12 and 2022-23 (the number of people in extreme poverty fell from 344 million to 75 million). That is the same source, the same method, and the same window as the 496 million, and it sits right next to NITI Aayog’s 248 million. Both say roughly 250 to 270 million people escaped poverty in the core period.

The 496 million is bigger only because $4.20 is a higher bar than $3. More people sit just below $4.20 a day, so more people cross it when incomes rise.

Why there is no number for the Modi tenure alone

A natural question is: how many people were pulled out of poverty during the Modi tenure specifically, using the World Bank’s measure? There is no published answer, because there is no 2014 survey to measure from.

The World Bank’s estimates rest on three household surveys: 2011-12, 2022-23, and 2023-24. The 2017-18 survey was scrapped by the government, so there is no 2014 baseline. The Bank only reports the 2011 and 2023 endpoints.

What the data does show is that the decline was concentrated after 2014. NITI Aayog’s MPI fell fastest from 2015-16 to 2019-21, about 135 million people in five years, which is when the large welfare schemes (Jan Dhan, Ujjwala, Swachh Bharat, PM Awas, Ayushman Bharat) were all live. The 2011-2014 stretch is only three of the twelve years, and the decline was slower then.

The tenure-aligned number that does exist is NITI Aayog’s 25 crore (2013-14 to 2022-23). It starts the year the Modi government took office, and it is the figure the Prime Minister cites himself. It is a different measure, but it is the only published number that lines up with the tenure.

The caveats, honestly

Both numbers carry caveats worth knowing. The World Bank’s 496 million rests on comparing surveys that used different methods: the 2011-12 survey used the Uniform Reference Period, while the 2022-23 survey used the Modified Mixed Recall Period, which tends to produce lower poverty estimates. The Bank tried to correct for this, and it acknowledges the limitation in its own technical documentation. Economists including Himanshu, C. Rangarajan, and S. Mahendra Dev have questioned the comparison; their own estimates put extreme poverty higher than the Bank’s.

NITI Aayog’s MPI has its own debate. A 2024 investigation by the Reporters’ Collective argued that the bank-account indicator drove much of the improvement, since the share of Indians living in a household with no bank account fell from 58.11 percent in 2005-06 to 9.66 percent in 2015-16, and under 4 percent by 2019-21, largely because of Jan Dhan. Whether a bank account should count as heavily as it does in a poverty index is a fair question.

Neither caveat erases the decline. Both measures, built differently, point the same way, and by a large amount. But the exact size of the decline depends on which ruler you use, and that is the point: a poverty number is only as clear as the definition behind it.

Sources

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Updated 9 November 2026