India’s remarkable growth figures have, however, successfully masked a far less appealing set of statistics which shows that, despite the success of India’s middle class, when you look at government delivery of basic services to the poor, India has been struggling against being hyphenated less with China than with its more desperate and impoverished neighbours – Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan – and by some indices has been failing to compete with the poorest in sub-Saharan Africa.

For, even at the height of India’s boom, amid talk of space missions to Mars and fleets of nuclear submarines, and as the country tripled its defence budget to become one of the world’s top ten military spenders, it has also been home to one-third of the world’s poor. A full quarter of its population – about 310 million people – live in poverty.

Read Here – New Statesman