India Accounts for One Third of the World Poor: World Bank

"Directing investment towards the poor will require coordinated effort by the Bank, our country partners, and the international development community, and will, let's face it, entail sacrifice on the part of those who are fortunate enough to be better off," Basu said.

According to the report, after steadily increasing from 51 percent in 1981 to 58 percent in 1999, the extreme poverty rate fell 10 percentage points in Sub Saharan Africa between 1999 and 2010 and is now at 48 percent--an impressive 17 percent decline in one decade.

In Latin American Countries, after remaining stable at approximately 12 percent for the last two decades of the 20th century, extreme poverty was cut in half between 1999 and 2010 and is now at 6 percent.

However, despite its falling poverty rates, Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world for which the number of poor individuals has risen steadily and dramatically between 1981 and 2010. There are more than twice as many extremely poor people living in SSA today (414 million) than there were three decades ago (205 million).

As a result, while the extreme poor in SSA represented only 11 per cent of the world's total in 1981, they now account for more than a third of the world's extreme poor.

India contributes another third (up from 22 percent in 1981) and China comes next, contributing 13 percent (down from 43 percent in 1981).

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