In Lok Sabha seats where poverty declined, BJP took a hit, Congress doubled tally

During the Lok Sabha election, one of the prominent themes of the ruling BJP’s campaign was the government’s efforts to alleviate poverty. Of the 517 Lok Sabha seats that saw a decline in the population of the poor since 2015-’16, the BJP won 232 seats, a 63-seat decline from its tally in 2019 when it won 295 seats. The Congress, on the other hand, grew from 42 seats in 2019 to 92 in 2024. The NDA won a total of 282 such seats and the Opposition INDIA alliance 226.

In his campaign speeches, Prime Minister Narendra Modi frequently spoke of the government’s role in bringing an estimated 25 crore people out of multidimensional poverty over the past decade, as per the NITI Aayog. Multidimensional poverty measures “acute deprivations in health, education, and living standards” and is tracked by the NITI Aayog using National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data collected every five years.

A Lok Sabha constituency-level database compiled by a team led by Harvard University professor S V Subramanian on socioeconomic indicators from the National Family Health Survey showed that the share of the population living in multidimensional poverty fell in the 517 seats and rose in only 26 constituencies between 2015-’16 and 2019-’21. While 314 of these 517 seats voted for the same party this time, 203 seats changed their preference.

Of the 295 such seats that the BJP won in 2019, it retained 201 this time and lost 88 to members of the INDIA bloc and three to Independents. The Congress picked up the most such seats at 42, followed by the Samajwadi Party (SP) that won 24, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) that won eight, the Nationalist Congress Party (SP) that won six, and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and Left that won two each. The BJP gave up