Nearly 80 per cent of the estimated 70 million people around the world who fell into extreme poverty at the onset of COVID-19 in 2020 were from India, a recent World Bank report has revealed.
Renowned Indian economist Jayati Ghosh said COVID was “undoubtedly India’s worst health calamity in at least a century”.
But she said the pandemic’s consequences go beyond the direct effects on health and mortality.
“There were very significant policy failures – owing to government action and inaction – that were responsible for widespread and significant damage to Indian livelihoods and for the country’s decline in terms of many basic indicators of economic well-being,” she wrote in the online journal Project Syndicate.
She said that while the country already suffered from glaring inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunities long before COVID-19, the government’s pandemic response has taken them to “unimaginable extremes”.
“Even as Indian workers faced poverty, hunger, and ever-greater material insecurity due to the pandemic, money and resources continued to flow from the poor and the middle class to the country’s largest corporations and wealthiest individuals.
“At the heart of India’s self-inflicted economic catastrophe is the government’s decision to provide very little compensation or social protection, even as COVID-19 lockdowns deprived hundreds of millions of their livelihoods for several months.”