Poverty alleviation: Why India is not able do to what China has pulled off

What should concern India is not just its loss of economic momentum, but also the fact that it is not outpacing countries not even remotely like China in growth and development, writes T N Ninan

Whichever way one looks at it, Xi Jinping’s announcement that China has abolished absolute poverty is an epochal event. From being one of the poorest societies on earth, and accounting along with India for the overwhelming bulk of the world’s absolute poor, China has now reached a level of per capita income that is close to the global average (measured using purchasing power parity, or PPP). And it has raised a claimed 850 million people out of poverty.
 
As with all Chinese statistics, there is some quibble about the numbers. China uses as its benchmark a basic World Bank-prescribed