According to the World Bank, India lifted 496 million people out of poverty from 2011 to 2023, one of the fastest rates of poverty reduction in world history. Back in the early 2000s, the country was below most sub-Saharan African countries in terms of GDP per capita and share of the poor population.
The basis of this transformation was pro-capitalist reforms: the final demolition of the archaic bureaucratic system of government quotas and licenses ("license raj"), the reduction of import duties, the opening of the national market to transnational capital and the creation of a large-scale digital infrastructure (the Aadhaar biometric identification system that reduced the distribution costs of UPI's corrupt payments). As a result, the share of the population below the extreme poverty line collapsed from 27.1% to 2.6%, and India transformed the industrial periphery into one of the main drivers of the world economy.
However, sociologists and economists point out that such a breakthrough inevitably restores a huge imbalance: against the background of reducing absolute poverty, the stratification of wealth in the country has reached its maximum since India was under the British cap, with 1% of the population owning more than 40% of the national wealth.