Idea of poverty among Muslims needs to be corrected: New paper, Pg7

Key Highlights:

• A new paper indicates that India has "virtually eliminated" extreme poverty between 2011-12 and 2023-24.
• The poverty rate among Muslims (1.5%) is slightly lower than among Hindus (2.3%) in 2023-24.
• In 2022-23, the poverty rate among Muslims was 4%, which is 0.8 percentage points behind Hindus at 4.8%.
• The paper uses data from the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey conducted by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.

Detailed Insights:

• The paper challenges the common perception of higher poverty incidence among Muslims compared to Hindus, particularly in the context of extreme poverty.
• Extreme poverty is defined by the World Bank as living on less than $3 per person per day in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, closely aligned with the Tendulkar poverty line.
• The national poverty rate significantly declined from 21.9% in 2011-12 to 2.3% in 2023-24, with a sharper decline in rural areas (22.5 percentage points) compared to urban areas (12.6 percentage points).
• Poverty reduction is observed across all major social groups, including Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), Other Backward Classes (OBCs), and Forward Castes (FCs), with poverty among STs falling to 8.7% in 2023-24.
• The Tendulkar poverty line was set at Rs 932 per person per month in 2011-12, Rs 1,714 in 2022-23, and Rs 1,804 in 2023-24, serving as the benchmark for poverty assessment in the study.

Key Concepts Involved:

• Extreme Poverty: Living below $3 per person per day in purchasing power parity terms.
• Purchasing Power Parity (PPP): A method that adjusts exchange rates to equalize the purchasing power of different currencies.
• Tendulkar Poverty Line: A poverty line based on a methodology suggested by the Tendulkar Committee, used for estimating poverty in India.