Has development been successful in removing poverty? Can you relate development to progress? (1985)
Change is value-neutral; development is planned change towards a desired end; progress is a stronger claim still — movement towards the good. The question therefore has two parts: an empirical one about poverty, and a conceptual one about whether development deserves the name of progress.
Has development removed poverty?
It has sharply reduced poverty without removing it.
- Multidimensional poverty. NITI Aayog’s national index records the headcount ratio falling from 29.17 per cent in 2013-14 to 11.28 per cent in 2022-23, with about 24.82 crore people moving out of multidimensional poverty in nine years.
- Extreme income poverty. The World Bank’s Poverty and Equity Brief (2025) puts the share below the $2.15 line at 2.3 per cent in 2022-23, down from 16.2 per cent in 2011-12 — roughly 171 million people.
Three findings block the stronger claim of removal:
- Deprivation persists in non-income form. The fifth National Family Health Survey (2019-21) found 57 per cent of women aged 15-49 and about 67 per cent of children under five anaemic, the latter worse than five years earlier. Rising incomes have not translated into nutrition.
- Distribution has worsened. Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty and Anmol Somanchi find the top one per cent holding 22.6 per cent of national income and 40.1 per cent of wealth in 2022-23, a historically unprecedented concentration.
- Insecurity, not merely income. Most Indian workers remain in informal employment without contract or social security, so households cross the poverty line without escaping the risk of falling back below it.
Theory explains why headcounts mislead. Amartya Sen recast poverty as capability deprivation and famine as entitlement failure amid adequate food supply; Peter Townsend‘s relative deprivation defines poverty by the standards of the society one inhabits, so no fixed line can abolish it. Oscar Lewis‘s culture of poverty, by contrast, locates the fault in the poor and inverts cause and effect.
Can development be related to progress?
- Classical evolutionism fused the two — Auguste Comte‘s law of three stages and Herbert Spencer‘s social evolution treated the later as the better, an optimism inherited by W. W. Rostow‘s stages of growth.
- They came apart once development’s costs became visible. Andre Gunder Frank showed development at the core producing underdevelopment at the periphery; Ulrich Beck (Risk Society, 1986) showed advanced industrialism manufacturing hazards it cannot insure against; displacement and ecological loss fall on those who gain least.
- They can be reconnected only through a normative criterion. Sen’s Development as Freedom (1999) supplies one: development is progress in so far as it expands the real freedoms people have reason to value. By that test India’s record is mixed — the Human Development Report 2025 ranks India 130 of 193 with an HDI of 0.685, and inequality erases 30.7 per cent of that value. Jean Drèze and Sen (An Uncertain Glory, 2013) called this growth outrunning its social base.
Conclusion
Development has made Indian poverty shallower without dissolving it, because it has raised averages faster than it has widened capabilities. Development becomes progress only when evaluated from the position of the worst off — which makes the distribution of gains, not the rate of growth, the properly sociological question.