India’s finance minister said on Monday fast economic growth and rapid urbanization would slash the number of people in extreme poverty by 2021 and end it completely in the decade after that. More than 21 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2011, when the last census was taken, according to the World Bank. The economy is a major issue in a staggered general election that began on Thursday and will end on May 19, with the main opposition Congress party rejecting a rosy picture Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been presenting.
