The covid-19 pandemic pushed millions of Indians into poverty

In its latest assessment of the global economy, the World Bank warned that turbulence from rising inflation and the threat of new covid-19 variants have left poor countries vulnerable to a “hard landing”. Indians may feel that the crash has already happened. The country has lost 5m lives to the virus, the highest toll in the world, according to The Economist’s excess-deaths tracker. Its economy has been battered after one of the world’s strictest and arguably least effective lockdowns. According to a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an American organisation, millions have fallen into poverty as a result.