Appreciative of the economic growth in India, the World Bank said on Wednesday it (the growth) has not generated more inequality in the country.
The bank also criticised developed countries for their slow response in financing the poor nations.
"Growth did not generate more inequality (in India)," the World Bank chief economist Francois Bourguignon said addressing a seminar titled 'The Poverty-Growth-Inequality Triangle,' organised by ICRIER in New Delhi.
He said poverty reduction was possible through reducing inequality.
About the developed world, he said, "We didn't see Official Development Assistance increase as it should, despite the commitments made by the rich countries."
Elaborating on the triangle, Bourguignon said there was "an arithmetical relationship between distribution and distributional changes and aggregate income level and growth with the absolute poverty and poverty reduction."
Rapid elimination of absolute poverty was a 'meaningful' goal for development and called for strongly country-specific combinations of growth and distribution policies, he said.
Poverty reduction in a country was determined by the rate of growth of the mean income of the population and the change in the distribution of income, the bank official said.
"The real challenge to establish a development strategy for reducing poverty lies in the interactions between the distribution and growth, and not in the relationship between poverty and the growth on one hand and poverty and inequality on the other," he said.
Bourguignon said it was important to consider growth and income distribution 'simultaneously' and to recognise that the income distribution matters as much as growth for poverty reduction.
Highlighting that country specificity mattered 'a great deal,' he said the growth elasticity of poverty was higher in the case of middle-income country.
He stressed that both growth and distribution elasticity of poverty depend 'positively' on the level of development and 'negatively' on the degree of inequality.
"Effective re-distributive policies may, in fact, yield a double dividend -- they reduce poverty today and accelerate poverty reduction in the future," he said.
He said the process of social stratification could not be separated in a historical perspective from the process of political transition.