Asia's surging economic growth has helped to reduce levels of poverty in the region, a report has said. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) estimated that the number of people living on less than $1 a day fell to 22% of the region's population in 2002. That compares with 34% in 1990 and shows "considerable progress in the fight against poverty", the bank said. The poor may be getting richer, but the gap between the haves and have nots continues to widen, the ADB said. Some areas have lagged and the ADB identified South Asia as a region where more needs to be done. "In South Asia, neglect of public investments in physical and social infrastructure, combined with policy and institutional rigidities in agriculture, has limited growth of the rural economy," the ADB said. "Such neglect has perpetuated age-old inequalities in the distribution of access to land, credit and social services. "The end result has been that even where aggregate economic growth has been reasonable, few opportunities are created for the rural poor." The ADB found that 93% of the extremely poor, those living on or below the $1-a-day threshold, were to be found in India, China and South Asian countries. In India, 357 million people were living in extreme poverty, with 203 million in China and 77 million in South Asia. The ADB's concern is that the speed of growth seems to be widening the gap between the poor and rich, rather than narrowing it. "One worrisome element that we are witnessing in developing Asia is that this inequality is increasing over time," Ifzal Ali, the ADB's chief economist, was reported as saying by Agence France Presse. "Despite the fact that in developing Asia the initial levels of inequality were lower than in other parts of the world," Mr Ali told reporters in Tokyo. The poor are still being left behind because of limited access to education, land, credit and infrastructure such as irrigation, roads and electricity, the bank said. Steps need to be taken soon because "if the degree of inequality increases over time, the poor will benefit still less from growth," the ADB said.