Nithya Subramanian
On Wednesday, the Reserve Bank of India released data on household savings for the third quarter of 2020-’21. This covered the October-December 2020 period, which means the data captured the aftermath of first Covid-19 wave in India and the economic disruptions that containment measures such as lockdowns caused.
The numbers are disappointing with a sharp dip in the net financial assets of households. Not only does this point to the economic hit the Indian middle class has taken but it is also bad news for India’s post-Covid economic recovery, given that it might mean reduced spending as well as a lower corpus available for investment.
An Infosys building at Electronics city IT district in Bangalore,. | Vivek Prakash/Reuters
When India’s IT services industry returns to work in a post-pandemic world, it would have stepped up its sustainability quotient.
Carbon emissions in India’s IT sector have fallen 85% to 0.3 million tonnes between March 2020 and March 2021, compared to 2 million tonnes in the year prior, according to market intelligence firm UnearthInsight. The green gains are mainly because less than 5% of the 4.4 million employees in the Indian IT outsourcing industry were travelling to work during this time.
The top five IT services companies – Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, HCL Technologies, Wipro, and Tech Mahindra – spent 75% less than last year on commutes to work, domestic travel, and international travel, according to UnearthInsight.
How the accumulation of debt during the Covid-19 pandemic is hurting India’s low-income households
Household-debt-to-GDP ratio increased to 37.1% in the second quarter of 2020, The debt levels of daily wage workers around the country have increased, surveys show. | Punit Paranjpe/ AFP
Six years ago, 24-year-old Munna Kumar Singh and his family migrated to Delhi from a small town in Bihar, where he worked in a denim factory in the city’s Udyog Vihar for a monthly salary of Rs 9,000. He is the sole breadwinner in the family of four. He also tries to send a small remittance to those at home in Bihar. When he lost his job with last year’s lockdown to curtain the spread of Covid-19, Singh struggled to make ends meet. He ended up borrowing extensively from informal channels. He is now over Rs 50,000 in debt with no stable income to repay his loans.