How has COVID-19 impacted households in Odisha & Uttar Pradesh?

Part 2 of the NCAER-Nossal Longitudinal Household Study

India has just begun its virus vs vaccine race with the roll-out of the Covishield and the Covaxin vaccines. Vaccinating India’s billion plus population as equitably and as quickly as possible will be India’s grand public health challenge. Meeting this challenge, and guiding policy and programs to promote rapid recovery, requires policymakers at the Centre and in India’s States to understand the impact of the pandemic on incomes, jobs, migration, availability of essentials, and health and health service use.

On January 22, NCAER returned with findings from Part 2 its longitudinal household telephone survey on the pandemic’s impact on households in Odisha and Uttar Pradesh.  The study is being done in collaboration with the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne in Australia. For this webinar, NCAER hosted NCAER’s Fellow Prabir Kumar Ghosh and NCAER’s collaborators at the University of  Melbourne’s Nossal Institute for Global Health,  Barbara McPake, Ajay Mahal and Sumit Kane. The discussion was moderated by NCAER Director General, Shekhar Shah.

For the Round 2 of this study, we polled 2,000 households during October 7-21, 2020 in Bargarh and Dhenkanal districts in Odisha and Chandauli and Firozabad districts in UP.  Of these, 1,340 households were repeated from Round 1, when we interviewed 2,068 households during June 9-18, 2020.  Part 2 of this study provides a view of how households were coping with the pandemic just after India had passed its peak daily infection rate in mid-September.  Round 1 had reported on conditions in the second week after the end-May lifting of the lockdowns. The Odisha-UP surveys are also gauging perceptions about the return to work, concern for one’s neighbours, the reliance that can be placed on others, fears related to the virus and isolation, and faith in government’s ability to handle the pandemic.   The sample households for this study come from a larger NCAER-Nossal study funded by the Gates Foundation on “Health Seeking Behaviour in Four Indian States”.

The presentation is available on this webpage

The earlier round of this telephone survey is available here.