How have Indians at large fared under this government?

livemint.com:

A significantly large part of Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s interim budget speech last week was devoted to outlining the performance of the incumbent government. With general elections only months away, this was expected. And like a political speech, her delivery on 1 February highlighted an increase in the per capita income of Indians by more than 50% over the last decade, along with the government’s claim of about 250 million Indians having moved out of multidimensional poverty during the same period.

But how realistic are these claims? The claim of poverty reduction is based on extrapolated estimates of poverty using the Multi-Dimensional Poverty (MPI) measure adopted by the Niti Aayog. While the claim may be right, it is not a substitute for the conventional measure of poverty based on consumption expenditure that India has been using since independence. The fact that we don’t have consumption expenditure data after 2011-12 makes it difficult to arrive at any estimate based on consumption poverty in the country.

But the only available estimate from the leaked report of 2017-18 and several other estimates from alternative sources of data suggest that the pace of India’s poverty reduction slowed down after 2011-12 from the 2004-05 to 2011-12 period. On Indian per capita income, the finance minister is right that it has increased by more than 50% over the past decade (i.e., between 2013-14 and 2023-24). However, the same data from the national accounts also shows a clear trend of deceleration, with per capita income increasing by 35% in the first five years, but decelerating to less than half (i.e.