India’s unequal Covid pandemic – Luxury SUVs for the rich, lost homes for the poor: Bloomberg June 14, 2021, 10:28 AM IST in Foreign Media, Economy, India, World, TOI
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By Andy Mukherjee
Mercedes-Benz AG recently introduced its Maybach sport utility vehicle in India right in the middle of a fierce second wave of the pandemic. The 50 cars the German automaker wanted to sell by the end of 2021 were lapped up in a month. It turns out that just as the rich were scrambling to own these $400,000 wheels, annual per capita income was sliding below $2,000, with the country falling behind neighboring Bangladesh.
Emerging economies have historically tolerated higher inequality, hoping to hit the inflection point in the Kuznets curve, beyond which incomes keep rising but disparities fall. Whatever the merits of the controversial hypothesis, the gap opened up by Covid-19 is no price of progres
Middle-East Arab News and Opinion - Asharq Al-Awsat is the world’s premier pan-Arab daily newspaper, printed simultaneously each day on four continents in 14 cities
Mercedes-Benz AG recently introduced its Maybach sport utility vehicle in India right in the middle of a fierce second wave of the pandemic. The 50 cars the German automaker wanted to sell by the end of 2021 were lapped up in a month.
Modi has extended — until November — an existing program to make available fixed amounts of free food grains to 800 million people. Additional wheat and rice entitlements did help the poor last year. Yet, in the absence of incomes, the bottom quartile of the population had to drastically cut down expenditure on eggs, meat and fruit.