Instead of celebrating the fall in poverty numbers, critics within and outside UPA keep carping
Even the popular narrative, which paints the ST as the victims of development, is thoroughly falsified by the evidence.
Evidence that poverty has declined since India began to liberalise in the 1980s, that the acceleration in growth to 8-9% range since the mid-2000s has resulted in accelerated poverty reduction and that these trends hold for each broad social group rather than just the aggregate population is as irrefutable as it gets in social sciences.
In the accompanying graphic, taken from a recent study by Megha Mukim and the author, show the proportion of the population below the conventional poverty lines in rural and urban areas, respectively, in 1983, 1987-88, 1993-94 and 2004-05 among the scheduled castes (SC), scheduled tribes (ST) and non-scheduled (NS) castes.