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On Thursday, in comparison to the time without the outbreak, an analysis by Pew Research Center showed that due to pandemic-induce economic recession, almost 75 million Indian people fell into the poverty line last year.
It is found that India records almost 60% of the global increase in poverty in 2020. The analysis shows that poor people live on $2 or less daily.
Currently, India has experienced one of the largest covid outbreaks. As per the report on Friday, India has reached a total of 11.51 million infections. As per the data from Johns Hopkins University, it is found that the death count has raised to 159,300.
However, the International Monetary Fund forest of the Indian economy to shrink by almost 8% at the end of this month before it starts increasing by 11.5% in the upcoming fiscal year which starts from April.
A senior researcher at Pew Research Center in a report stated that the increase in poverty in India “claws back several years of progress on this front.”
Starting from 2011 to 2019, the count of poor people in India was estimated to have dropped from 340million to 78million. This number might have fallen further to a 59million in the last year without the pandemic.
Even the growth in the country’s middle class took a hit. Specifically, the ones that lie in the middle-income tier which is defined as $10.01 to $20 per day. From 2011-2019, India has grown from 29 million to 87 million. Further, it is expected to fall to 66million in 2020 because of the Covid recession as per Kochhar.
Like India, China has a huge population of around a 1.4billion people, but covid created an effect on poverty which was much smaller in China as per Pew Research Center.
Right now China’s economy has expanded almost by 2.3% in the last year. Further, it is expected to grow by almost 8.1% this year, as per the latest IMF forecast. Kochhar said, it found that only the major economy grew in 2020 which has helped poverty levels to remain “virtually unchanged.”
All over the world, an additional 131 million people have now become poor because of the global recession in the last year and the research firm said that when compared with what it might have been of the pandemic didn’t happen.
“Given that India and China also account for more than a third of the global population, with about 1.4 billion people each, the course of the pandemic in these two countries — and how each recovers — will have a substantial effect on changes in the distribution of income at the global level.”
