From Poverty to Empowerment: India’s Imperative for Jobs, Growth, and Effective Basic Services

More than two decades have passed since India embarked on major economic reforms—and although official poverty rates have declined sharply since then, millions of Indians continue to face significant deprivation in terms of quality of life and access to basic services. This research presents a new analytical measure, the Empowerment Line, to assess what constitutes a meaningful, economically empowered standard of living. It also introduces the Access Deprivation Score, a tool to measure the availability of basic services across different parts of India. The report research analyses recent history to understand what successfully drove improvements in living standards in the past - and it looks ahead to quantify the relative potential of various growth strategies that can create a better quality of life for the average Indian citizen by 2022. The authors highlight critical reforms that are precursors to achieving these outcomes and draw on more than 350 case examples to present a host of innovations that can be used to deliver affordable basic services to the poor more effectively.