CRITICAL BUT STABLE

This year, governments across the world had a difficult choice thrust upon them. Covid-19 allowed them to save either the maximum number of their citizens’ lives or the highest number of their livelihoods. Like most, the Indian government chose the former. In doing so, it faced one of the most challenging situations the country has seen post-Independence—the economy spiralling deeply into the red. While most analysts say that the bad run will be limited to a few quarters, ruling out a full-blown recession, there is no getting away from the fact that India’s growth rate is deeply in negative territory. And while there are debates over the size of the impact—whether the country’s growth rate has fallen by five per cent or much more—the economic damage done by the nationwide Covid-19-induced lockdown and the subsequent localised lock-downs in some areas has indeed been enormous.

It is then no surprise that economic issues were at the top of participants’ minds in the INDIA TODAY Mood of the Nation (MOTN) poll, conducted during the lockdown. A whopping 63 per cent of those polled said their incomes had fallen recently, with 22 per cent saying that they had lost their jobs. Almost all sectors of the economy—barring agriculture and to some extent the supply of ‘essential goods’—came to a standstill in the first month of the lockdown, from the midnight of March 24-25 onward. The