The number of people living below the poverty line in India decreased by 415 million between 2005-06 and 2019-21: Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)

According to a new Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) released jointly by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford, The number of people living below the poverty line in India decreased by 415 million between 2005-06 and 2019-21. India still has the world's highest number of poor at 228.9 million, followed by Nigeria (96.7 million projected in 2020). Across 111 countries which were assessed using the most recent comparable data available, 1.2 billion people (19.1 percent) live in acute poverty and almost half of these people (593 million) are children under the age of 18 years. The developing region with the largest number of poor people is Sub-Saharan Africa (nearly 579 million), followed by South Asia (385 million). India had 97 million poor children in 2019-21. 90 percent of India’s poor people live in rural areas and 10 percent in urban areas. Bihar continues to be the poorest state in the country. Others among the top 10 poorest states were Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Arunachal Pradesh and Rajasthan. West Bengal was the only state among the top-10 poorest in India in 2015-16, and not in 2019-21.

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