During Covid, free food helped rein in poverty in India: IMF paper

India has "eliminated low-income poverty (which is based the purchasing power parity or PPP of $1.9 per person a day)", the lead author of the paper said

The government's food subsidy programme has blunted the hit on the poor by the Covid-induced lockdowns and has successfully brought down the poverty rate since its introduction in 2013 barring the pandemic-affected 2020-21, finds a working paper of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). 

The paper, Pandemic, Poverty, and Inequality: Evidence from India, finds fault with the earlier study by the Pew Research Centre that 75 million people were pushed into poverty in 2020 due to Covid, saying it was based on the outdated methodology of the uniform reference period (URP). One of the authors of the study -- former chief economic