Will Covid decimate India's middle class?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 4 May 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Millions of Indians risk being knocked back into poverty by the current explosion in coronavirus infections.
Rahul Tandon hears from Radhika, who abruptly lost her job in Mumbai when India went into lockdown last year, and has since struggled with thoughts of suicide. Newspaper columnist Sandip Roy discusses how Covid threatens to strip many self-identifying middle class of their sense of comfort and security. Meanwhile, many women who run their own businesses face ruin, according Renu Shah, who runs Shakti - an organisation that helps women entrepreneurs.
We also hear opposing views on how big a setback the middle class faces from Covid from two leading Indian economists - Pravin Krishna of John Hopkins University, and Jayati Ghosh of Jawaharlal Nehru University.
(Picture: A Covid-19 patient in Gurudwara, India; Credit: Naveen Sharma/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:04.5 | Coming up, we look at how COVID has impacted India's middle class and hear from some of them who've lost their jobs. |
| 0:11.7 | I had suicidal thoughts, but being a single child, I couldn't take that step which I wanted to definitely that time. |
| 0:18.4 | As I have my mom's responsibility on me and she's a senior |
| 0:21.3 | citizen. And as some predict a huge decline in India's middle class, we look at the long-term |
| 0:27.6 | implications of India's second deadly wave of COVID. I think these have set back India by about |
| 0:35.0 | two decades. It's terrifying. You locked it down brutally at a time |
| 0:39.0 | when you didn't need to. You opened up when, you know, cases were still rising. |
| 0:43.6 | That's all coming up here on Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:53.8 | That is a sound that has become all too common in India. |
| 1:00.1 | Distraught relatives mourning the death of another loved one as the cases of COVID continue to rise. |
| 1:08.0 | Hajas is a volunteer at a temple giving free oxygen in New Delhi. |
| 1:12.6 | I'm speechless about this situation, what's going on and how people are suffering. |
| 1:18.6 | Their family members are dying in front of them in their hands just due to lack of infrastructure |
| 1:23.6 | and lack of basic necessities which which is not available in hospitals. |
| 1:28.1 | And it's a complete blunder, I must say, and no one should face such issues. |
| 1:32.6 | As we heard there, the Narendra Modi government has been criticized for not being better prepared. |
| 1:38.3 | But a spokesperson for the ruling BJP Narenda Tenja said India's experience was similar to others. |
| 1:46.9 | Medical infrastructure is overwhelmed. We saw similar things in a city like New York. We saw in |
| 1:51.9 | Italy. We saw in several other countries. In the West, the so-called developed West, we saw that. |
| 1:56.5 | And it's not only the ordinary people. A judge of the Supreme Court of India, who is called in India, |
| 2:01.0 | we call such people VIP, very important people. He died of COVID. It's not only the ordinary people. |
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