Existing studies suggest that India has made significant progress in reducing poverty during the decades leading up to the pandemic (Bhalla et al. (2022), Edochie et al. (2022), Newhouse and Vyas (2019), and Sinha Roy and van der Weide (2022)). However, the magnitude of the decline in poverty over the past decade is highly uncertain given the lack of official household expenditure data after 2011. While India’s robust growth over the past decade likely contributed to such a reduction, the authorities have also expanded social assistance programs, most notably through the 2013 National Food Security Act, whereby the government provided enhanced rations of food to the bottom 50 and 75 percent of the urban and rural populations, respectively. Broader measures of poverty likely declined as well, reflecting the government’s development interventions in health and education—for example, a saturation of village electrification and toilets, which was achieved in 2018. Similarly, the Multidimensional Poverty Indicator (MPI) shows a large reduction in poverty in India, where about 275 million people moved out of multidimensional poverty between 2005-06 and 2015-16 and about 140 million people between 2015-16 and 2019-21.