India s GDP growth for the financial year 2020-21 was revised to -7.3 percent from -8 percent, as the country registered a 1.6-percent economic growth in the January-March quarter, according to government data released recently.
However, the signs of economic recovery India witnessed during the last quarter of the financial year are being erased by a rampant second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
At present, India continues to record over 100,000 new COVID-19 cases each day. Amid the second wave, many states have announced lockdowns and curfews, with most industrial activities suspended, hence fewer household incomes and a higher unemployment rate.
P. Chidambaram, a Congress opposition leader, noted Tuesday that the per capita GDP had fallen below 100,000 Indian Rupees (1,372 U.S. dollars) over the financial year 2020-2021, down by 8.2 percent year-on-year.
Ramesh Ram, 31, is listed as a textile industry staff worker in the administration s database of migrant workers in south west Bihar s Kaimur district. But for the last three years, Ram has worked as a contract labourer among the tens of thousands employed at the Alang ship-breaking and recycling yard in Gujarat, making enough to get by. Today, Ram is back in his village, with no work, no capital to till his small parcel of land, and living in penury with his family of six, which includes three young daughters aged 6, 8 and 10. Even before the second Covid-19 wave hit India this February, tens of millions of workers such as Ram had barely managed to recover from the adverse economic effects of the nationwide lockdown to control the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
India's annual economic growth rate picked up in January-March compared with the previous three months, but economists are increasingly pessimistic about this quarter after a huge second wave of COVID-19 infections hit the country last month.
Many Indians are angry about what they see as Western media bias in the publication of near-daily images of funeral pyres in pandemic reports on the country, writes Shareen Joshi, Not only do these pictures fail to reflect the complexity of India, these inadvertent media flubs are now "routinely weaponized" by political actors.