New Delhi: A report published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) revealed that the Union government has wiped out extreme poverty in India. The study said that the Union government has been able to keep poverty in India below 1% during the Covid-19 pandemic period. Prime Minister’s Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana and other social welfare programmes helped for this. A working paper authored by economists Surjit Bhalla, Arvind Virmani and Karan Bhasin has revealed this.
The study claimed that the consumption inequality has been brought down to its lowest levels in 40 years. The number of people living in extreme poverty — defined by the World Bank as living on $ 1.9 or less in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms — was 0.8% of the population in the pre-pandemic year 2019 in the country. PPP is a metric that equalises the buying power of different currencies to make comparisons easy.
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As per the study, food rations provided by the central government ensured that extreme poverty did not increase in the country. The paper also said that the real (inflation-adjusted) inequality measured by the Gini coefficient is at 0.294%. It is very close to its lowest level 0.284% reported in 1993-94. The Gini coefficient ranges from 0 to 1, with 0 representing perfect equality and 1 representing perfect inequality.
Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Ann Yojana (PMGKAY) was launched in 2020 to distribute a fixed quantity of free foodgrain (5kg per head) to the poor beyond their usual entitlement of 25kg a month of subsidized grains. Over 800 million beneficiaries under the National Food Security Act are covered by the programme.
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