The release of two papers — from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) respectively — has once again brought the poverty debate in the limelight. The two papers have claimed that extreme poverty in India has declined substantially. The World Bank paper, using the Consumer Pyramid Household Surveys (CPHS) data, has put it at 10.2 percent (2019). The IMF paper, however, calculates poverty by using the National Statistical Organisation’s Consumer Expenditure Survey as base and adjusting it for direct effect of massive food grain subsidy given under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) 2013 and the PM Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY) during the pandemic period, and claims that extreme poverty has almost vanished at 0.77 percent (2019) and 0.86 percent (2020).