Covid-19, Amplifying the Return of Mass Poverty in India
Résumé
The Covid-19 crisis in India acts as a revealer (just like in film photography) of latent tendencies - or, for lovers of physics metaphors, as a particle accelerator: it has accentuated the authoritarianism of power and the stigmatization of Muslims (accused of spreading the disease). It has also highlighted the fragility of the country's results in terms of the fight against poverty. In 2019, the UNDP reported that India had succeeded in lifting 271 million people out of poverty between 2006 and 2016. However in the same year, India’s Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, which conducts the National Sample Survey, indicated that for the first time since this type of measurement was available, the percentage of Indians living below the poverty line had begun to rise again, because of the immiseration of the countryside (where about two-thirds of the population still lives). The Covid-19 crisis has amplified this process dramatically.