NEW DELHI: In the time that it takes you to read this article, several Indians will have escaped the clutches of extreme poverty. In fact, about 44 Indians come out of extreme poverty every minute, one of the fastest rates of poverty reduction in the world. As a result, India has finally shed the dubious distinction of being home to the largest number of poor, with Nigeria taking that unwanted position in May 2018.If present trends continue, India could drop to No. 3 later this year, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo taking the number 2 spot. Defining extreme poverty as living on less than $1.9 a day, a recent study published in a Brookings blog says that by 2022, less than 3% of Indians will be poor and extreme poverty could be eliminated altogether by 2030.The study, published in the ‘Future Development’ blog of Brookings, says, “At the end of May 2018, our trajectories suggest that Nigeria had about 87 million people in extreme poverty, compared with India’s 73 million. What is more, extreme poverty in Nigeria is growing by six people every minute, while poverty in India continues to fall.”However, the estimates of extreme poverty reduction may not match with Indian numbers because of differences in how poverty is measured. According to the World Bank, between 2004 and 2011 poverty declined in India from 38.9% of the population to 21.2% (2011 purchasing power parity at $1.9 per person per day).Quick Edit: India is still a poor country, Modi government must push more reformsEconomists said the finding of the study supports the argument that rapid economic growth had helped make a dent in extreme poverty. “Basically it supports the growth story and the 1991 economic reforms that have helped reduce poverty,” said N R Bhanumurthy, professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy. “Going ahead, the challenge is to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, which will help realise the study’s findings that India would be able to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030,” he said.Bhanumurthy said the assumption that India would be able to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030 seems realistic given the country’s record in the past 10 years in reducing poverty and its ability to meet the Millennium Development Goals. “But to achieve that we must continue to grow at 7%-8% for the remaining period,” he said. The UN-sponsored Sustainable Development Goals aim to eliminate global poverty by 2030.The benchmark projections of poverty by country imply a high speed of poverty reduction in South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, fuelled by the high rates of income per capita growth in India, Indonesia , Bangladesh, the Philippines , China and Pakistan , the study says. It showed global income increases in the last decades have led to systematic decreases in poverty rates worldwide, with the experience in India and China having played the most important role when it comes to the overall number of persons escaping absolute poverty.At the heart of the study is the World Poverty Clock. It takes into account household surveys and projections of economic growth from the IMF’s World Economic Outlook. These form the basic building blocks for poverty trajectories computed for 188 countries. The study said that Africa accounts for about two-thirds of the world’s extreme poor.If current trends persist, they will account for nine-tenths by 2030. Fourteen out of 18 countries in the world where the number of extreme poor is rising are in Africa, it added. The study model estimated that on September 1, 2017, 647 million people lived in extreme poverty. “Every minute 70 people escape poverty (or 1.2 people per second). This is close to the Sustainable Development Goal target (92 people per minute, or 1.5 per second) and allows us to estimate that around 36 million people have escaped extreme poverty in the year 2016,” it added.Read this story in Marathi