New Delhi, July 10 -- After declaring that India has almost eliminated extreme poverty, the government's Press Information Bureau (PIB) has picked up another set of estimates from the World Bank. This PIB release last week used the Bank's estimates of Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, to declare that India is now the fourth most equal country in the world. These estimates are not new. They were part of the Bank's release a month ago along with its poverty estimates.

The PIB is right on the rank of India among all 177 countries for which Gini data is available on the Bank's Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP). But what the PIB did not mention was that the Bank itself cautions against comparing Gini numbers from consumption surv...