Economic Growth and Urban Poverty in India Amaresh Dubey 1 Shivakar Tiwari 2 Abstract Urban poverty in most of the developing world is considered a spillover of rural poverty. With increasing pace of development in these countries, urban settlements are assimilating migrants searching for better livelihood opportunities and who could be vulnerable and poor in the urban settlements. This article empirically assesses the levels of urban poverty in India at the disaggregated level and examines how recent growth episode has impacted poverty reduction. This article finds that growth in general has been reducing poverty, but its effect in reducing poverty over different geographical domain has not been uniform. We find that rising inequality is playing a significant role in differential reduction of urban poverty in India and in its states. Keywords Economic growth, urban settlements, poverty, inequality Introduction Inverse relationship between economic growth and poverty reduction is well established in the literature (Dollar & Kraay, 2002; Ravallion & Chen, 1997; World Bank, 2000). 1 It has been argued that about 87 per cent of reduction in poverty is due to economic growth (Srinivasan, 2011). With very high levels of historically observed poverty levels, a higher level of growth has been considered, therefore, as the necessary condition for reducing poverty incidence in India. The Indian growth experience since the 1950s till about the 1970s has been lacklustre, average growth being around 3.5 per cent annually (Srinivasan, 2011). It is only since the 1980s that the acceleration in growth started. And it moved on to the altogether higher growth trajectory since the 1990s (Srinivasan, 2011). The momentum in the economic growth achieved during the 1990s further increased during the 2000s with the average real growth rate being over 8 per cent during 2004–2005 and 2011–2012 (Thorat & Dubey, 2012). Article Environment and Urbanization AsiA 9(1) 18–36 © 2018 National institute of Urban Affairs (NiUA) sAGE Publications sagepub.in/home.nav DOi: 10.1177/0975425317748451 http://journals.sagepub.com/home/eua 1 Professor of Economics, Centre for the study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, india. 2 PhD candidate, Centre for the study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, india. Corresponding author: shivakar Tiwari, PhD candidate, Centre for the study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, india. E-mail: shivakar1984@gmail.com