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The pandemic in data: Not only are India’s poor eating less, they are eating less nutritious food
Even before the pandemic hit, India was one of the world’s most malnourished countries. As could be expected for such a country with such poor development indicators, Covid-19 hit India’s poor hard. To compound the problem, the Indian government put in place what was the world’s harshest lockdown with little planning.
A new paper by economists Jean Drèze and Anmol Somanchi has now analysed survey data (collated here) to look at the impact of India’s first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 on food deprivation. Their conclusion is grim: “the lockdown and the economic recession that followed led to a severe nutrition crisis”.
Income crash
The first impact of the lockdown was obviously on incomes and employment as India put in place the world’s harshest restrictions which shut down almost all economic activity.
Average income decrease from pre-lockdown
Source Reference period (2020) Avg income reduction (%)
Bertrand et al.
April-May 42 Dalberg April-May 56 CSE-APU (Round 1) April-May 64 IDinsight+ (Round 1) May 72 CEP-LSE May-July 48 IDinsight+ (Round 2) July 68 IDinsight+ (Round 3) Sept 74 CSE-APU (Round 2) Sept-Nov 50 IDinsight+ surveys non-agricultural households.
Across the board, surveys showed a drastic drop in incomes compared to pre-lockdown levels.
A survey by IDinsight, a data analytics organisation that focuses on the social sector, found that the average weekly…