This week on NL Hafta, Abhinandan Sekhri, Manisha Pande, Anand Vardhan and Raman Kirpal discuss India’s latest poverty estimates and the US midterm elections. 

They are joined by Nitin Bharti, assistant professor at the University of Western Australia and South and Southeast Asia coordinator at the World Inequality Lab, and Joyojeet Pal, professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, whose research focuses on technology, democracy and politics.

The discussion begins with the World Bank’s latest Poverty and Equity Brief, which says India's extreme poverty declined from 27.1 percent to 2.6 percent between 2011 and 2023.

Nitin explains, “If the consumption of one person per day is about, let's say, 106 rupees or so, and if you consume more than that, you are above the moderate poverty line.” That works out to around Rs 3,200 a month, while the extreme poverty threshold is only around Rs 2,200.

He also points to the 233 million people who remain below the Rs 3,000-a-month threshold.

“The headline figure should have been that, yes, there has been some achievement, but you still have 233 million people who are consuming less than Rs 3,000 a month,” says Nitin.

Raman Kirpal brings the conversation to the political use of poverty and welfare. Recalling an old Ministry of Finance study, he says one person had benefited from 27 different poverty-alleviation schemes and was still poor. “Poverty has served as a political tool also,” Raman says. “Politicians use it very often.”

The second half of the episode turns to the midterm elections in the United States, where Democrats won control of both chambers of the US Congress. Joyojeet joins the panel to discuss what the result means for Donald Trump, MAGA and the wider American right.

Joyojeet sees the result as a major setback for Trump’s movement, but not for conservatism itself. “This could be the end of the MAGA movement,” he says. “Absolutely not the end of the conservative movement.”

He points to the cost of living as one of the issues that hurt Trump with his own base, arguing that voters increasingly felt the impact of his policies in their everyday lives.

“The price of gas is clearly one that hurts his MAGA base,” Joyojeet says.

The discussion also looks at the growing backlash against Big Tech, data centres and corporate influence in American politics. Joyojeet argues that voters are increasingly uncomfortable with the power technology companies exercise over their lives. “People have realised there’s ways in which tech is kind of taking over their lives,” he says.

He points to Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate campaign in Michigan, which made AI regulation a central political issue. Joyojeet says El-Sayed was unusual among politicians in treating AI as a defining political question rather than simply another technology story.

“AI is the main issue going ahead,” Joyojeet recalls him arguing, alongside a call for much stronger government regulation of the technology.

All this and more.