Over 80% of households in India lost income due to lockdown, says study

Researchers found that Covid-19 had little to do with it, and said 34% of the households would not be able to survive past one week without more assistance.

Pedestrians and shoppers wear protective masks at a vegetable market in Mumbai | Representational image | Photographer: Dhiraj Singh | Bloomberg

Mumbai: About 84% of Indian households saw their incomes fall last month under the world’s strictest shelter-at-home rules, and many won’t survive much longer without assistance, a study shows.

The Chicago Booth’s Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation analyzed data from the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt., collected through surveys covering about 5,800 homes across 27 Indian states in April. The researchers found that rural areas were hit the hardest and the spread of the coronavirus had little to do with the economic misery.

“Rather, income per-capita before the lockdown, lockdown severity, and the effectiveness of the delivery of aid are likely contributors,” they wrote.

The findings are in line with previous data from the CMIE and others, which showed that more than 100 million Indians have lost their jobs since March 25, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi stopped the production and sale of all but the most essential goods and services to contain the spread of the virus. His government on Thursday offered cheap loans and free food to farmers and workers in India’s vast informal sector to ease the pain.

Both Hindus and Muslims — the two largest religious groups in the nation of 1.3 billion people — were equally impacted by the lockdown, and the worst-hit states were Tripura, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Haryana. The study’s authors are Marianne Bertrand, professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Kaushik Krishnan, chief economist at CMIE, and Heather Schofield, an assistant professor at the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School.

Most worryingly, they found that 34% of all households reported being able to survive for no more than one week without additional assistance.

The highest earners saw the lowest declines probably because they hold “stable, salaried jobs, with the ability to work from home and continue to earn a living,” according to the report. The smallest earners perhaps have occupations that continued despite the lockdown — such as farming, or food vendors — the authors said.

“The remaining households appear to be exposed to substantial job losses that have not been buffered by additional transfers,” they added.- Bloomberg