THE increasing trend of living costs has multiplied the miseries of city dwellers across the country amid the coronavirus pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of people in the country have undergone income loss as economic activities slowed down due to the pandemic while the prices of essentials, utility bills, transport fares, medicine prices continued to rise with time. A study revealed that the livelihoods of 98.3 per cent of poor have severely been affected by the Covid-19 crisis with 87 per cent of them going through a food and nutrition crisis and 5 per cent taking one meal a day as they have lost their income for the pandemic. The government must realign the expenditure from infrastructural mega projects to livelihood support to the poor to middle-income groups until the economy gets restored.
Besides the daily-life regular expenses, maintaining health safety and internet data and smart devices for children’s online education have been added as new areas of expenditure. The overall inflation rate in April rose to 5.96 per cent from 5.48 per cent in March and food inflation increased to 5.91 per cent from 4.87 during the time. The national poverty rate rose to 35 per cent in 2020 from 24.3 per cent in 2016 due to the adverse impacts of the pandemic. The pandemic has turned a large number of people into new poor, exposing them to food, accommodation and education vulnerability. Another study said 10 crore people are facing high economic and health vulnerability due to the coronavirus pandemic.
People are getting exhausted in their efforts to cope with the rising costs of living against the income loss. Many new poor have adopted coping strategies, at the individual level, by switching occupations, and reverse migration but this would not work without state support to them. There is no immediate remedy for the crisis, thus the government should widen the social safety net for newly poor and unemployment benefits. Otherwise, the government has to work in nutrition, food intake, poverty, education, crimes, and many other issues.
