India not home to largest number of people in extreme poverty now: Study

Nigeria has overtaken India and the Democratic Republic of the Congo could soon take the number two spot

India is no longer the home to the largest number of people living in extreme poverty, a recent study says. Nigeria, in western Africa, is now at number one, says the report published by US think-tank Brookings.

It says the Democratic Republic of the Congo, also in Africa, could soon get the number 2 tag. The blog mentions that by the end of May 2018, Nigeria had about 87 million people living in extreme poverty, compared with India’s 73 million. Extreme poverty in Nigeria is growing by six people every minute.

According to the World Bank, a person living on less than $1.90 a day falls in the extreme poverty category.

The study suggests that based on the (the UN's) Sustainable Development Goals, India needs to set new targets and get 1.6 people per second out of the ambit of extreme poverty in order to completely eliminate extreme poverty. 

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or Global Goals, comes under United Nations Development Programme policy. These goals are defined as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet for better living. 

The SDGs came into effect in January 2016, and they will continue to guide UNDP policy and funding until 2030.

The study, published in the ‘Future Development’ blog of Brookings, says: "India is moving down in global poverty rankings.”

The findings of the study are based on the The World Poverty Clock. Each April and October, World Poverty Clock data are updated to take into account new household surveys (an additional 97 surveys were made available this April). 

These surveys use publicly available data on income distribution, production and consumption provided by various international organisations, most notably the UN, World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. These form the basic building blocks for measuring poverty computed for 188 countries and territories, developed and developing, across the world.

The Brookings study also makes a grim forecast for Africa, which may be on the brink of becoming more poverty-stricken with time. 
 

The study says, " Africans account for about two-thirds of the world’s extreme poor. If current trends persist, they will account for nine-tenths by 2030. Fourteen out of 18 countries in the world—where the number of extreme poor is rising—are in Africa." 

Furthermore, it says, "Given a starting point of about 725 million people in extreme poverty at the beginning of 2016, we needed to reduce poverty by 1.5 people every second to achieve the goal and yet we’ve been moving at a pace of only 1.1 people per second."

The study, which is also in association with a paper presenting the methodology of the World Poverty Clock published under Nature's Palgrave Communications, says, "Every minute 70 people escape poverty (or 1.2 people per second). This is close to the SDG-target (92 people per minute, or 1.5 per second) and allows us to estimate that around 36 million people have escaped extreme poverty in the year 2016."