By Dr. Gyan Pathak

Even two years after the pandemic and support in its response to enable people survive, millions of families across the world still “cannot afford food or essential healthcare services” since they have been pushed deeper into poverty, says a new joint report by UNICEF and the World Bank while urging the countries across the world for rapid expansion of social protection systems and support for children and their families, a call that is most significant for India since it is significantly affected and heading towards winning the tag of home to the largest number of new poor in the world.

It is also worth recalling that India and Nigeria are among the most significantly affected countries among the middle-income group of countries, the region that may be home to about 80 per cent of the new poor, according to the latest World Bank data. There are other concerns too, such as climate change that has presented a particularly acute threat for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia – the region where most of the global poor are concentrated. India has the largest share of poor because of its big population and is most likely to retain this status because it would become the most populous country in the world by 2027.

The report “Impact of COVID-19 on welfare of households with children” has said that two-thirds of households with children have lost income during the pandemic. The lost earnings have left adults in a quarter of all households in the position where children are going a day or more, without food. Moreover, adults in nearly half of households with children reported that they themselves were skipping a meal due to lack of money. Around a quarter of adults in households with or without children, reported finding themselves out of work, during the course of the pandemic so far.

According to the recent data, the report said, the economic crisis generated by the pandemic threatens to hit children and families the hardest. The number of children living in multidimensional poverty – without access to education, health, housing, nutrition, sanitation or water – soared to approximately 1.2 billion in 2020, while an estimated additional 100 million children were projected to have fallen into multidimensional poverty in 2021. In about 40 per cent of households children were even deprived of the basics, since they were not engaged in educations activities in their homes and their schools were closed.

Even before the pandemic one in six children worldwide – 356 million – experienced extreme poverty, where households struggled to survive on less than $1.9 a day. At that time 40 per cent children were living in moderate poverty, and nearly one billion children lived in multidimensional poverty in developing countries, a figure that has since increased by 10 per cent as a result of the pandemic.

Commenting on the situation on the ground the UNICEF Director of Programme Group Sanjay Wijesekera has said, “Families cannot afford food or essential healthcare services. They cannot afford housing. It is a dire picture, and the poorest households are being pushed even deeper in poverty… The modest progress made in reducing child poverty in recent years risks being reversed in all parts of the world … Families have experienced loss at a staggering scale. … Inflation reached its highest level in years.”

“The disruptions to education and healthcare for children, coupled with catastrophic out-of-pocket health expenses which affect more than one billion people, could put the brakes on the development of human capital – the levels of education, health and well-being people need to become productive members of society,” said Global Director of Poverty and Equity for the World Bank, Carolina Sánchez-Páramo. She warned that the current situation “could lock in increases in inequality for generations to come, making it less likely that children will do better than their parents or grandparents.”

India needs to take the remarks seriously, since it has already been reported in another survey ICE360, that income of the poorest 20 per cent households had plunged 53 per cent in the pandemic year 2020-21 from their levels in 2015-16. The second lowest 20 per cent lost their income by 32 per cent and the third lowest 20 per cent suffered an erosion of 9 per cent in their income. Oxfam report titled “Inequality Kills” has also said that the income of 84 per cent of the Indian households have declined in 2021 and over 4.6 crore Indians were estimated to have fallen into extreme poverty alone in 2020, and also nearly half of the global new poor were reported living in India according to a United Nations estimate.

These clearly indicate that many people who had barely escaped extreme poverty before March 2020, when the pandemic outbreak, could have been forced back into it. A World Bank report says that the “new poor” probably will be more urban than the chronic poor, be more engaged in informal services and manufacturing and less in agriculture, and live in congested urban settings and work in the sectors most affected by lockdowns and mobility restrictions. (IPA Service)

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