Poverty has been on the decline in India at a faster clip since the early 2000s. Political slugfest has been there for credit. Who did it better? Manmohan Singh or Narendra Modi?
Turns out that both the Prime Ministers did more or less equally well on the poverty reduction front.
Columnist Swaminathan Aiyer has quoted a recent IMF study as saying that extreme poverty fell from 5.1 percent in 2014 to 0.76 percent in 2019. This was remarkable before the pandemic. During 2020 and 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic impacted millions of poor people, the rate of poverty reduction came down. However, due to some welfare measures, the worst fears didn't come true.
How about the track record of Congress? In the Manmohan Singh years (he was in power from 2004 to 2014), poverty declined from 31.9 percent to 5.1 percent. "This suggests that the heavy lifting was done by the Congress Party, and the Modi government simply took that forward," Aiyer writes.
