Indian citizens now have the same upward mobility opportunities as American citizens.
Credit: www.udupitoday.com

Ah, America. Land of opportunity. Take a deep breath and smell the possibilities. As Obama said in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, “a nation that gave someone like me a chance.” A nation that allowed a wide-eyed kid from Hawaii and member of the Choom gang to become its president. But are the chances of upward mobility in America all that great? In a new report released on Tuesday, hours before Obama’s remarks, the World Bank claimed that it is now about as easy to move out of poverty or from low-class to middle-class status in India as it is in America.

Entitled “Addressing Inequality in South Asia,” the report notes that (based on gini coefficient measures of income distribution and inequality) between 2004 and 2010, roughly 40 percent of India’s poor (or 9 percent of the total population) moved above the poverty […]