Explained : Modi’s Strategic Moves Boost India’s Growth and Confidence and Its Impact

AN ASPECT OF Modi’s policies that has a strong bear­ing on his appetite for reforms is the government’s success in maintaining and accelerating a dramatic reduction in poverty. The decline in extreme poverty was vis­ible towards the latter part of the Congress-led UPA’s 2009-14 second term but corruption cases, a fractious coalition and an overreliance on rights-based welfare handouts proved to be the Manmohan Singh government’s undoing. Although the subject of India’s success in reducing poverty has been studied in detail, economist and current head of the Sixteenth Finance Commis­sion Arvind Panagariya and Vishal More, founder of Interlink Advisors, in their 2025 paper, ‘Mapping Poverty across Social, Religious and Economic Groups in India’, bring out just how much India has changed, pointing out that poverty rates of Mus­lims—often seen to lag socio-economic indicators—are nearly 1 per cent below that for Hindus. Using the Tendulkar poverty line for 2011-12, 2022-23 and 2023-24, they conclude: “The estimates indicate that the decline in poverty over the 12 years from 2011- 12 to 2023-24 has been substantial and broad-based, to the point that the country has virtually eliminated extreme poverty.” They point out that even in the Scheduled Caste (SC) population, seen to struggle to access growth and redistributive programmes, pov­erty fell to 8.7 per cent in 2023-24, less than half the level observed in the general population in 2011-12. “At 1.5% the poverty rate among Muslims is now nearly a percent­age point below the 2.3% rate among Hindus,” the paper says.