What this meant was that anyone spending more than Rs 47 per day in urban areas and Rs 32 per day in rural areas was not ‘poor’. Since then, no new poverty line, at least one backed by the government, has been created. On the other hand, the decline in the percentage of the population below the poverty line was the least in Kerala and Himachal Pradesh. These estimates were based on inflation-adjusted 2023-24 poverty lines of Rs 1,632 for rural areas and Rs 1,944 for urban areas. According to the World Bank, India’s poverty headcount ratio stood at 23.9 per cent in 2022 at the $4.2 per day international poverty line for lower-middle-income countries.