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Studies reveal households self-employed in agriculture or engaged in salaried jobs fared better those employed in informal sector.

COVID-19 has now started sneaking into the hinterlands whose contexts happen to be drastically different from the large metros where the fight against the virus has mostly been concentrated so far. The emerging dilemma now is whether to persist with the existing models or to introduce necessary corrections in them. If we decide on the later arriving at these adaptations would pose an even greater challenge.

It is now emphatically established that repercussions of the pandemic transcend well beyond the health sector and stretch into almost all dimensions especially social economic and psychological. An adroit management of non-health sectors is found to have significantly bolstered the fight against this virus in the health sector. So the successful models to effectively contain the spread of the virus have had a distinctive balance between the priorities of health and non-health sectors.

In this context the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) in collaboration with the Nossal Institute of Global Health University of Melbourne Australia conducted a study during June 9-18 during the first phase of the unlock. The study covered four districts — Chandauli and Firozabad in Uttar Pradesh and Bargarh and Dhenkanal in Odisha and sampled about 2100 households.

This study is uniquely positioned to assess the situation on three planes before during and after the lockdown from economic social and psychological perspectives. Another incidental advantage of the study is that it was conducted in Uttar Pradesh and Odisha which are now emerging as new hotspots of COVID-19. So findings of the study can potentially play a big role in suitably contextualising models for these two states.

Prior to the lockdown the distribution of households on the basis of sources of income was almost similar in Uttar Pradesh and Odisha with about 30 per cent of the households self-employed in agriculture 27 per cent engaged as causal labourers and 24 per cent self-employed in non-agriculture. This occupational structure witnessed a major upheaval during the lockdown. While people in 60 per cent of the households could continue in their old occupations those in 29 per cent became jobless and the remaining 11 per cent shifted their occupations.

The economic impact of lockdown exhibited wide variations across occupations and between states. The proportion of households reporting a reduction in income was 81 per cent in Odisha and 76 per cent in Uttar Pradesh. Across occupational categories the highest proportion reporting a reduction in income were households engaged in casual employment.

The proportion of households with no income was 30 per cent in Uttar Pradesh and 27 per cent in Odisha. Occupation-wise households with casual employment suffered — 47 per cent of them were left with no income and another 18 per cent had to shift their occupations. Thus about two-thirds of these households were exposed to economic vulnerabilities.

The general trend in the intensity of income disruption among households across occupations tapered from self-employed in agriculture through salaried to those who are self-employed in non-agriculture sector. Along with the income disruptions supply shortages of essential items also emerged with a distinct geographic pattern. A higher proportion of households could not access food-items vegetables and fruits in Uttar Pradesh and cooking fuel egg meat and fish and even medicines in Odisha.

The incidence of in-migration has effectively stopped the flow of remittances and further aggravated the already precarious economic situation. About 10 per cent of the households reported in-migration with Uttar Pradesh reporting a slightly higher proportion than Odisha.

Amid such fluid economic conditions households carved out a diversified coping mechanism to strike a balance between reduction in incomes and emerging supply shocks. Even the coping mechanism had a notable spatial distinction. The proportion of households borrowing money was around two-thirds in Uttar Pradesh compared to just 17 per cent in Odisha. However with respect to receipt of government assistance Odisha had a higher proportion of households (59 per cent) as compared to Uttar Pradesh (46 per cent). A more striking revelation was that 35 per cent households in Uttar Pradesh reduced their expenditure by consuming less as compared to just 5 per cent similar households in Odisha.

An analysis of the coping mechanism across occupations reveals that 71 per cent of households with casual employment accumulated debt as compared to just 19 per cent of households who were self-employed in non-agriculture. Similarly 31 per cent of casual labour households even had to reduce their consumption of essential items to compensate for the loss of income. Thus the intensity of the economic shock due to the lockdowns varied across geographies and occupation groups.

During the unlock-1 phase a very high proportion (72 per cent) of households reported returning to their work places. However interpreting this as a robust sign of an economic revival might be a hasty because the highest proportion of workers resuming work was from those in casual employment. Interestingly the proportion of households that reported returning to their workplaces was higher in Odisha (75 per cent) as compared to Uttar Pradesh (53 per cent).

People have exuded tremendous courage optimism and resilience in the face of this adversity. On being asked about their perception on their financial situation in coming 12 months a little more than half of the households expected either an improvement or no change. However one-third of them foresaw a deterioration in their financial situation. At the state level a higher proportion of the households in Uttar Pradesh sensed a net deterioration in their financial situation as compared to Odisha.

The government solicited near unanimous support from the people. While 95 per cent of households supported the lockdown strategy 92 per cent were confident of the government’s ability to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.

These findings reveal that households in Odisha are in a better position than those in Uttar Pradesh as are those self-employed in agriculture or in salaried jobs as compared to those engaged in casual employment. Thus policy must be differentiated at a fairly disaggregated spatial scale dynamic to promptly address the continuously evolving crisis people-centric responsive and nested across social economic demographic and gender spectrums of society. This study has provided crucial insights in this respect and would help in formulating evidence-based policy to accommodate the changing contexts of COVID-19.

Prabir Kumar Ghosh and Sumit Kumar are fellow and consultant at NCAER respectively

The country’s demographic future will see peaking and then declining numbers driven by a sharp fertility reduction

A new study published in the highly regarded journal The Lancet and prepared by the Seattle-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) has shaken up the world of population policy. It argues that while India is destined to be the largest country in the world its population will peak by mid-century. And as the 21st century closes its ultimate population will be far smaller than anyone could have anticipated about 1.09 billion instead of approximately 1.35 billion today. It could even be as low as 724 million.

Readers who follow COVID-19 projections will remember that in March 2020 the IHME projected U.S. deaths from COVID-19 to be around 81000 by August. Deaths in the U.S. today are more than twice that number. The underlying assumptions for the initial model were not borne out. The IHME population projections are also subject to underlying assumptions that deserve careful scrutiny. They predict that by the year 2100 on average Indian women will have 1.29 children. Since each woman must have two children to replace herself and her husband this will result in a sharp population decline. Contrast this predicted fertility rate of 1.29 for India with the projected cohort fertility of 1.53 for the United States and 1.78 for France in the same model. It is difficult to believe that Indian parents could be less committed to childbearing than American or French parents.

Until 2050 the IHME projections are almost identical to widely-used United Nations projections. The UN (https://bit.ly/2PGYALh) projects that India’s population will be 1.64 billion by 2050 the IHME projects 1.61 billion by 2048. It is only in the second half of the century that the two projections diverge with the UN predicting a population of 1.45 billion by 2100 and the IHME 1.09 billion.

Part of this divergence may come from IHME model’s excessive reliance on data regarding current contraceptive use in the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) and potential for increasing contraceptive use. Research at the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) National Data Innovation Centre by Santanu Pramanik and colleagues shows that contraceptive use in the NFHS is poorly estimated and as a result unmet need for contraception may be lower than that estimated by the IHME model generating implausibly low fertility projections for 2100.

Fertility decline

Regardless of whether we subscribe to the UN’s projections or the IHME projections India’s demographic future contains a peaking and subsequently declining population driven by a sharp reduction in fertility. In the 1950s India’s Total fertility rate (TFR) was nearly six children per woman; today it is 2.2. Ironically the massive push for family planning coupled with forced sterilisation during the Emergency barely led to a 17% decline in TFR from 5.9 in 1960 to 4.9 in 1980. However between 1992 and 2015 it had fallen by 35% from 3.4 to 2.2.

What happened to accelerate fertility decline to a level where 18 States and Union Territories have a TFR below 2 the replacement level? One might attribute it to the success of the family planning programme but family planning has long lost its primacy in the Indian policy discourse. Between 1975 and 1994 family planning workers had targets they were expected to meet regarding sterilisations condom distribution and intrauterine device (IUD) insertion. Often these targets led to explicit or implicit coercion. Following the Cairo conference on Population and Development in 1994 these targets were abandoned.

If carrots have been dropped the stick of policies designed to punish people with large families has been largely ineffective. Punitive policies include denial of maternity leave for third and subsequent births limiting benefits of maternity schemes and ineligibility to contest in local body elections for individuals with large families. However as Nirmala Buch former Chief Secretary of Madhya Pradesh wrote these policies were mostly ignored in practice.

Aspirational revolution

If public policies to encourage the small family norm or to provide contraception have been lackadaisical what led couples to abandon the ideal of large families? It seems highly probable that the socioeconomic transformation of India since the 1990s has played an important role. Over this period agriculture became an increasingly smaller part of the Indian economy school and college enrolment grew sharply and individuals lucky enough to find a job in government multinationals or software services companies reaped tremendous financial benefits. Not surprisingly parents began to rethink their family-building strategies. Where farmers used to see more workers when they saw their children the new aspirational parents see enrolment in coaching classes as a ticket to success.

The literature on fertility decline in western countries attributes the decline in fertility to retreat from the family; Indian parents seem to demonstrate increased rather than decreased commitment to family by reducing the number of children and investing more in each child. My research with demographer Alaka Basu at Cornell University compares families of different size at the same income level and finds that small and large families do not differ in their leisure activities women’s participation in the workforce or how many material goods they purchase. However smaller families invest more money in their children by sending them to private schools and coaching classes. It is not aspirations for self but that for children that seems to drive fertility decline.

In language of the past

Ironically even in the face of this sharp fertility decline among all segments of Indian society the public discourse is still rooted in the language of the 1970s and on supposedly high fertility rate particularly in some areas such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar or among some groups such as women with low levels of education or Muslims. This periodically results in politicians proposing remedies that would force these ostensibly ignorant or uncaring parents to have fewer children.

Demographic data suggest that the aspirational revolution is already under way. What we need to hasten the fertility decline is to ensure that the health and family welfare system is up to this challenge and provides contraception and sexual and reproductive health services that allow individuals to have only as many children as they want.

Sonalde Desai is Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland and Professor and Centre Director NCAER National Data Innovation Centre. The views expressed are personal

The NCR-Mumbai route tops in performance. NCAER finds harassment of truck drivers a major hitch across the routes surveyed

The Indian economy is going through a difficult phase due to the Covid crisis. Most of the rating agencies have downgraded the economy. And with Covid slowing down the world economy as well it implies that India has to run the extra mile to get export orders. On top of this logistics management has become a challenge with containment zones — where mobility is restricted — criss-crossing the landscape. Every rupee saved in logistics matters a lot in keeping the production cost low and thereby increasing the competitiveness of the economy.

A recent NCAER study indicates that transportation accounts for around 50 per cent of India’s logistics cost. Hence keeping a tab on the transportation cost and finding ways to reduce it is in the nation’s interest.

Of late the World Bank has developed a domestic logistics performance index (LPI) across nations including India. However these indicators provide only the status of logistics for India as a whole and not at a sub-national level. Given the regional disparity in infrastructure and development across India it is crucial to capture the regional perspective of logistics.

Moreover the survey for the World Bank Domestic LPI was undertaken only at the major growth centres and therefore does not provide an insight into the regional underpinnings.

In this context an effort has been made at NCAER to understand the logistics performance pertaining to transport activities at a sub-national level with a view to providing policy recommendations. We have identified 20 major domestic routes along which the majority of cargoes are moved across India. Understandably the routes include the Golden Quadrilateral the north-south east-west transport corridors and the upcoming dedicated freight corridors.

In general the origin and destination of each route correspond to metros or Tier-I/II cities where transport/warehouse hubs and manufacturers/producers are located. These routes ] were chosen based on interaction with stakeholders — transporters and third-party logistics (3PL) players.

The indicators

In each route the following aspects pertaining to transportation activities were tracked to judge the route’s efficiency: (1) road conditions including signage; (2) harassment by police/other agencies; (3) harassment by officials of the Regional Transport Office (RTO); (4)pilferage/leakage of consignment; (5) need to pay bribes/facilitation money; (6) unavailability of inter-modal exchange points; (7) limitations in terms of rail infrastructure; and (8) limited infrastructure in terms of parking terminals with refreshment facilities for drivers.

Since roadways have emerged as the principal mode of cargo movement our questionnaire mainly focussed on this aspect of transportation. However since policy-makers are increasingly focussing on railways and multi-modal cargo movement we also attempted to encompass this aspect in our measure by including indicators (6) to (8) listed above.

For each of these indicators the respondents were asked to rank their perceptions on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 implies that the challenge is of low intensity while 10 refers to a high-intensity challenge or problem. The sample size of the pan-India survey is about a little over observations.

A careful assessment of the eight indicators suggests that they may be grouped under two heads: ‘soft infrastructure’ and ‘hard infrastructure’. Grouping under ‘soft infrastructure’ implies that the score on these indicators may be improved with little investments.

On the other hand improving the score for indicators falling in the category of ‘hard infrastructure’ requires significant investments in terms of finance and time. Given the financial constraints during these Covid times it is unlikely that much progress would take place on hard infrastructure. So let us focus on the parameters in respect of soft infrastructure.

The Table lists the four most efficient and least efficient routes as per the perceptions of the transporters/3PL players. As this table shows the problem of harassment faced by the truck drivers from the RTO and police officials is serious irrespective of the efficiency of the routes. In fact this point has been stressed across all the 20 routes studied by us.

The NCR-Mumbai route records the best performance comparatively and the NCR-Guwahati route the worst performance. It may be noted that the NCR-Guwahati route also faces stiff challenges in terms of leakage of consignments and the ‘need to pay bribes’ along the route. In general the Mumbai-Hyderabad Mumbai-Bengaluru and Ahmedabad-Bengaluru routes entail the minimum problems with regard to the ‘need to pay bribes’. However it should also be noted that bribes are an inherent part of the system across all the routes.

In sum we find that the routes whose nodes are located in the western/northern/southern parts of India are more efficient than the others. By and large all routes for which at least one node is located in the eastern part of India score poorly in terms of our indicators. The policy measure is clear: there is need to pay greater attention to the development of soft transport infrastructure in eastern India.

Main takeaways

The key takeaways on soft infrastructure from open-ended interactions with stakeholders are the following:

There is an urgent need to train officials at check-points. As of now these officials prefer to work in the traditional way and are reluctant to accept electronic documents.

The absence of predictability in delivery is one of the major reasons that adds heavily to the logistics costs in India. The main reason for this is the prevalence of heavy traffic congestion at various bottlenecks not only in cities but also on major highways and expressways. Daily changes in diesel prices also add to variations and unpredictability in logistics costs.

Ensuring that freight trains run on schedule and operationalising modern freight terminals are critical steps for attracting rail freight.

Clearly some of these policy prescriptions are not too hard to implement even in this pandemic time.

The writers Dr Devendra B Gupta Senior Adviser and Dr Sanjib Pohit Professor are associated with NCAER. The views are personal.

The COVID-19 pandemic is preparing us to adapt to a diverse way of living with positives and major negatives that directly or indirectly affect our mental states

A recent study of the impacts of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Odisha and Uttar Pradesh was conducted by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER).

It offered valuable insights on the social economic and health impacts faced by households that consisted of adults who suffered from chronic breathlessness children who had acute respiratory conditions and women with gynaecological problems.

A survey was carried out in four districts in Odisha (Bargarh Dhenkanal) and UP (Chandauli and Firozabad) June 9-18 2020 the second week after the lockdown to curb the spread of COVID-19 was lifted.

The sample included 2068 households that were a part of the larger NCAER-Nossal study on Health Seeking Behaviour in Four Indian States. Samples included both urban and rural residents from these districts.

Around 27 per cent and 30 per cent of the households in Odisha and UP respectively had no income during the lockdown according to the study. Urban households (43 per cent) reported more loss of income compared to their rural counterparts (24 per cent).

There was a severe impact for households that relied on casual labour or non-agricultural self-employment as their main source of income during the lockdown in UP. In Odisha the impact was felt primarily by households whose members were engaged in casual labour.

The survey also found a large majority of households — 81 per cent in Odisha and 77 per cent in UP — reported some reduction in income. In contrast 95 per cent households interviewed supported the Union government’s lockdown strategy.

Results from the study showed the impact of the lockdown to be above and beyond economic impacts. It was instead an assortment of additional societal and psychological elements.

A unique feature of the study was it tried to measure the conditions of families before and after the lockdown to understand the disruption in the social economic and health status of the respondents.

We have all observed minor behavioural vicissitudes with major after-effects on our thoughts during this stretch. While buying necessities from the market for example someone at a shop may have obtrusively encouraged you to keep distance implying you could be the bearer of the infection. You hand over your card to pay for your purchases and the shopkeeper asks you to enter the PIN by using a toothpick.

Such changes do leave some sort of impression on our minds including simply walking on the streets looking at each other’s masked faces something that brings a sense of threat that the other person could be a carrier of the virus.

These are a few instances most of us can relate to in this world of the ‘new normal’. The lockdown intensified the number of those who became frustrated and depressed. There is an upsurge in social issues including psychological disorders domestic violence suicides etc. Children are getting depressed as well.

Depression affects 264 million people around the world due to no contact with their peer groups and minimal physical activities according to a May 14 United Nations report.

This pandemic is preparing us to adapt to a diverse way of living with positives and major negatives that directly or indirectly affect our mental states. These include a risk of depression and anxiety sense of detachment loneliness fear of losing our loved ones and stressing about our futures.

Interesting results were found by the NCAER survey over this: Of all responses about 95 per cent households were afraid of being infected and worried about becoming disengaged from others.

This showed how stressed an individual can become from fewer social interactions. Though online media plays an important role in keeping social connect the absence of opportunities for physical gatherings to a large extent causes depression in a certain set of people in society.

Stress is always a result of external repercussions and is presently coming from all directions. India has a rich culture of living in a close-knitted environment. It thus gets difficult for masses to acclimatise to this kind of ethos where they are constrained to meet people.

Nobody is deprived of such adverse bearings. Pecuniary effects are prominent all over but what about psycho-social impacts?

Social-distancing and its necessary norms set a certain number of challenges within family and other people. Around 86 per cent households fear losing their lives with almost 79 per cent respondents saying they were stressed due to being isolated something that can be a chief cause of escalation in cases of anxiety and depression.

Dealing with such hard-hitting conditions it’s our human tendency to hunt for a support system care and reliability from others especially in rural India with its amalgamation of care and support from neighbours who are treated as family adherents.

This statement is well supported by the outcomes initiated in the study. During the lockdown 81 per cent of households in Odisha were concerned about the well-being of their neighbours while this was only 41 per cent in UP.

On the other hand these figures were 77 per cent for Odisha and 29 per cent for UP before the lockdown. Another major factor that came up strongly through this study was reliability on others around them.

It was found that around 84 per cent of the respondents (Odisha at 97 per cent UP at 72 per cent) could rely on at least one person for support while 81 per cent of the respondents were open to support others (Odisha at 90 per cent UP at 72 per cent).

In both circumstances Odisha seems to be more socially connected and supportive to the society at large. This indicates an inner sense of fear accumulated over months of lockdown that has affected the lives and livelihoods.

This season of insecurity has worried the populace economically socially and psychologically. The pandemic is going to influence the economy as no other time has prompting enormous psycho-social effects to us with its effect noticeable in all-inclusive areas.

Its impact on underestimated segments however primarily women and children was huge in India and globally. COVID-19 has changed the world from numerous points of view: Few ramifications on mankind have left a blemish on the lives of every individual.

The issues of well-being decline of the labour-intensive economy scarcity of drugs sanitisers destitution and joblessness has without a doubt become the overwhelming focus of each and every one.

The infection may disappear (ideally) sometime yet the effect of this doubt will pose a potential threat to social relations. Major metropolitan cities in India still struggle to contain the virus. The only feasible way of defeating the pandemic is containing and eradicating it for our survival.

There is an urgency to build a system of ‘living cooperation’ to overcome the increasing dread of social-distancing and isolation. Any human investment (or investments in human values) in these social relations will certainly change or minimise the state of socio-psychological insecurity that has entered social life today.

Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.