India shows its job right now is a lot simpler — it just has to escape poverty and become an upper middle income country. And this proves a possibility that India can do it.

The challenge now for India is to make the leap that other countries made in the 2010s — to build abundant high-quality roads, trains, housing, and energy, provide decent jobs and livelihoods to the majority of its people, and catch up to the frontier of technology.

A lot of people don’t seem to realize how good of a start India has made. For one thing, extreme poverty in India has mostly been conquered over the last two decades.

This is an incredible accomplishment — a full tenth of humanity saved from deprivation. And what’s remarkable is that — India managed to do this incredible poverty reduction while also reducing inequality:

How did India manage this feat? The World Bank says that it was due to the two usual suspects — economic growth and redistribution:

Over the past decade, India has made remarkable progress in reducing poverty across both monetary and non-monetary dimensions, recording one of the fastest poverty declines in the world…This progress was mainly driven by strong consumption growth, rising employment, especially among women, and expanded social transfers, including food subsidies.

And Bloomberg expects Indian growth to accelerate even further, to 8% by the end of the decade. Neelkanth Mishra, the executive director of the World Bank, points out that because India’s recovery from the pandemic recession is still incomplete, there’s plenty of room for a growth acceleration.