NOIDA, India — Ashish Anand had dreams of becoming a fashion
designer. A former flight attendant, he borrowed from relatives and poured his
$5,000 life savings into opening a clothing shop on the outskirts of Delhi selling
custom-designed suits, shirts and pants.
اضافة اعلان
The shop, called the Right Fit, opened in February 2020,
just weeks before the coronavirus struck India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi
abruptly enacted one of the world’s toughest nationwide lockdowns to stop it.
Unable to pay the rent, Anand closed the Right Fit two months later.
Now Anand, his wife and his two children are among millions
of people in India in danger of sliding out of the middle class and into
poverty. They depend on handouts from his aging in-laws. Khichdi, or watery
lentils cooked with rice, has replaced eggs and chicken at the dinner table.
Sometimes, he said, the children go to bed hungry.
“I have nothing left in my pocket,” said Anand, 38. “How can
I not give food to my children?”
Now a second wave of COVID-19 has struck India, and the
middle class dreams of tens of millions of people face even greater peril.
Already, about 32 million people in India were driven into poverty by the
pandemic last year, according to the Pew Research Center, accounting for a
majority of the 54 million who slipped out of the middle class worldwide.
The pandemic is undoing decades of progress for a country
that in fits and starts has brought hundreds of millions of people out of
poverty. Already, deep structural problems and the sometimes impetuous nature
of many of Modi’s policies had been hindering growth. A shrinking middle class
would deal lasting damage.
“It’s very bad news in every possible way,” said Jayati
Ghosh, a development economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst. “It has set back our growth trajectory hugely and created much greater
inequality.”
The second wave presents difficult choices for India and
Modi. India on Friday reported more than 216,000 new infections, another
record. Lockdowns are back in some states. With work scarce, migrant workers
are packing into trains and buses home as they did last year. The country’s
vaccination campaign has been slow, though the government has picked up the
pace.
Yet Modi appears unwilling to repeat last year’s draconian
lockdown, which left more than 100 million Indians jobless and which many
economists blame for worsening the pandemic’s problems. His government has also
been reluctant to increase spending substantially like the United States and
some other places, instead releasing a budget that would raise spending on
infrastructure and in other areas but that also emphasizes cutting debt.
The Modi government has defended its handling of the
pandemic, saying vaccinations are making progress and that signs point to an
economic resurgence. Economists are forecasting a rebound in the coming year,
though the sudden rise in infections and India’s slow vaccination rate — less
than 9 percent of the population has been inoculated — could undermine those
predictions.
The heady growth forecasts feel far away for Nikita Jagad,
who was out of work for over eight months. Jagad, a 49-year-old resident of
Mumbai, stopped going out with her friends, eating at restaurants and even
taking bus rides, unless the trip was for a job interview. Sometimes, she said,
she shut herself inside her bathroom so her 71-year-old mother wouldn’t hear
her crying.
Last week, Jagad got a new job as a manager at a company
that provides housekeeping services for airlines. It pays less than $400 a
month, roughly half her previous salary. It could also be short-lived: the
state of Maharashtra, home to Mumbai, announced lockdown-like measures this
week to stop the spreading second wave.
If she loses her new job, Jagad is still the only support
for her mother.
“If something happens to her,” she said, “I don’t have the
money to even admit her in the hospital.”
India’s middle class may not be as wealthy as its peers in
the United States and elsewhere, but it makes up an increasingly potent
economic force. While definitions vary, Pew Research defines middle-class and
upper-middle-class households as living on about $10 to $50 a day. The kind of
income could give an Indian family an apartment in a nice neighborhood, a car
or a scooter, and the opportunities to send their children to a private school.
Roughly 66 million people in India meet that definition,
compared with about 99 million just before the pandemic last year, according to
Pew Research estimates. These increasingly affluent Indian families have drawn
foreign companies like Walmart, Amazon, Facebook, Nissan and others to invest
heavily in a country of aspirational consumers.
India’s middle class is central to more than the economy. It
fits into India’s broader ambitions to rival China, which has grown faster and
more consistently, as a regional superpower.
To get there, the Indian government may need to address the
people the coronavirus has left behind. Household incomes and overall
consumption have weakened, even though the sales of some goods have increased
recently because of pent-up demand.
Many of the hardest hit come from India’s
merchant class, the shopkeepers, stall operators or other small entrepreneurs
who often live off the books of a major company.
“India is not even discussing poverty or inequality or lack
of employment or fall in incomes and consumption,” said Mahesh Vyas, the chief
executive of the Center for Monitoring of the Indian Economy. “This needs to
change first and foremost,” he said.
Most Indians are “tired” and “discouraged” by the lack of
jobs, said Vyas, especially low-skilled workers.
“Unless this problem is addressed,” he said, “this will be a
millstone that will hold back India’s sustained growth.”
.jpg)
.jpg)
