News: The World Bank’s Spring 2025 Poverty and Equity Brief has ranked India as the fourth most equal country in the world based on the Gini Index, with a score of 25.5.
Key Highlights of the Report
| The Gini Index is a statistical tool that measures income inequality within a country. A score of 0 represents perfect equality, while 100 denotes perfect inequality. |
- This Gini score is lower than that of China (35.7), the USA (41.8), and the UK (34.4), indicating that income distribution in India is more equitable than in many advanced economies, including all G7 and G20 countries.
- Among 167 countries, Slovak Republic ranks first with a Gini score of 24.1, followed by Slovenia (24.3), Belarus (24.4), and then India (25.5).
- The report highlights that India falls in the ‘moderately low inequality’ group and is very close to joining the ‘low inequality’ category.
- India has lifted 171 million people out of extreme poverty since 2011–12.
- The World Bank has also revised the global poverty line from $2.15/day to $3/day to account for inflation and real consumption needs.
- As a result of this revision, the extreme poverty rate in India has dropped from 27.1% in 2011–12 to just 5.3% in 2022–23, reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty from 344 million to 75 million.
