India has in the past year witnessed a drastic drop in the number of poor. Studies suggest that 44 Indians come out of extreme poverty every minute, resulting India dropping down and thereby shedding the dubious distinction of being home to the largest number of poor, according to a Times of India report. Nigeria has now taken top spot.
The report adds that if present trends continue, India could drop to No. 3 later this year, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo taking the number 2 spot.
The study, published in the ‘Future Development’ blog of Brookings, says, “At the end of May 2018, our trajectories suggest that Nigeria had about 87 million people in extreme poverty, compared to India’s 73 million. What is more, extreme poverty in Nigeria is growing by six people every minute, while poverty in India falls.”
Last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in a report said that great progress has been made since 1990 in alleviating global poverty, but much remains to be done.
The UN-sponsored Sustainable Development Goals aim to eliminate global poverty by 2030. The benchmark projections of poverty imply a high speed of poverty reduction in south Asia, east Asia and the Pacific fuelled by high rates of income per capita growth in India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, China and Pakistan, the study says.
The study adds that Africa accounts for about two-thirds of the world’s extreme poor. The study model estimated that on September 1, 2017, 647 million people lived in extreme poverty. “Every minute, 70 people escape poverty (or 1.2 people per second). This is close to Sustainable Development Goal target (92 people per minute, or 1.5 per second) and allows us to estimate around 36 million people have escaped extreme poverty in the year 2016,” it said.
