Many people have given up looking: labour-force participation rates have fallen since the pandemic. cmie surveys suggest the unemployment rate is also higher, averaging more than 7% over the past two years. Take-up for a rural-employment programme, which guarantees low-wage work to participants, remains above pre-covid levels. ![]() Labour-market data also bely India’s impressive headline growth figures. Rural food costs have risen by 28% since 2019 onion prices by an eye-watering 51%. Poor families, for whom food makes up 60% of household expenditure, have felt the strongest pinch. Since then inflation has further eroded purchasing power: real wages in rural areas, where most of the poor live, have stagnated, and annual inflation jumped to 6.5% in January. The World Bank estimates shutdowns pushed 56m Indians into extreme poverty. The recovery from the pandemic, when harsh lockdowns whacked the economy, has been horribly slow. According to a survey of 44,000 households by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy ( cmie), a research outfit, only 6% of India’s poorest households-those bringing in less than 100,000 rupees ($1,200) a year-believe their families are better off than a year ago. ![]() ![]() These suggest poverty reduction has stalled, and maybe even reversed. ![]() Thus assessments and inferences must be made using other surveys and data sets, such as vehicle sales. Ministers have not published a poverty estimate in more than a decade. The problem is that answering the question is fraught with difficulty. Not many questions are more central to Indian politics than the wellbeing of the country’s everyman.
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