Despite all talks of development and talking of a strong economy a recent World Bank report claiming India accounts for the largest number of people living below international poverty line in 2013 is alarming. The report says that 30 per cent of its population lives under the $1.90-a- day poverty measure. India accounts for one in three of the poor population worldwide, the world body said in its inaugural edition of the report ‘Poverty and Shared Prosperity’, according to which extreme poverty worldwide continued to fall despite the global economy’s “under-performance”. India is by far the country with the largest number of people living under the international $1.90-a-day poverty line, more than 2.5 times as many as the 86 million in Nigeria, which has the second-largest population of the poor worldwide, the report said. Progress on extreme poverty was driven mainly by East Asia and Pacific, especially China and Indonesia, and by India. Half of the world’s extreme poor now live in Sub-Saharan Africa, and another third live in South Asia. Sub-Saharan Africa has one in two of the poor population worldwide, while India accounts for one in three, the report said. The World Bank said for this report, as with many other countries, the total poor population in India is based on estimates rather than actual numbers provided through a household survey collected in 2013. Such estimates are subject to a great deal of uncertainty, which typically arises because of revisions of national accounts in each country. The report says the average population-weighted shared prosperity premium is positive in all regions, save South Asia, where India’s large population and negative premium heavily influences the negative regional average. Only the top 10 in India earn sufficient average incomes to be part of the bottom 40 in the US if that is where they had been located. Observing that access to electricity boosts household incomes, the report said in India, household electrification has been found to raise labour supply by about 16 days a year among men and six days a year among women.
