Poverty in India : Some Latest Projections of IMF

The IMF projected in April 2009 that the growth rate of GDP in India would be 4.5 %, however this figure was raised to 5.4 percent in July, 2009 and 6.2 percent in 2010.

Using the national poverty line and a poverty elasticity of growth of 0.59, recorded during 1993-2004, this growth rate implies that the poverty rate would be 22.3 percent and 21.5 percent in 2009 and 2010 respectively.

The number of poor would be 268 million in 2009 and 262 million in 2010.

However, in April 2009, the IMF revised downwards its GDP growth projections for the country to three percent for 2009 and 4.1 percent for 2010.

The immediate implication is that the rate of poverty reduction would be slower, which in turn means that there would be a higher number of people below the poverty line than projected in April 2008.

The revised forecast indicates that the poverty rate would be 22.7 percent and 22.1 percent, respectively, for 2009 and 2010 and the number of people below the poverty line would be higher at 273 million in 2009 and 270 million in 2010.

This means that 13 million more people (five million more in 2009 and eight million more in 2010) than that projected by IMF in April 2008 would continue to be poor.