How India pulled 500 million people out of poverty, as inequality deepens

India lifted nearly 500 million out of poverty between 2011 and 2023, with extreme poverty dropping from 27.1 percent to 2.6 percent in the world’s most populous nation during the same period, according to a new report by the World Bank. The only other parallel in poverty reduction on this scale is China, which lifted more than 800 million people out of extreme poverty — though that was over a period of 40 years. Yet despite the substantial fall in poverty in India — home to 1.4 billion people — the income and wealth inequality gap has widened significantly since it opened up its economy in the early 1990s. According to the 2026 World Inequality Report, inequality in India remains among the highest in the world.