Key Points
And like a political speech, her delivery on 1 February highlighted an increase in the per capita income of Indians by more than 50% over the last decade, along with the governments claim of about 250 million Indians having moved out of multidimensional poverty during the same period..
While PLFS data suggests a moderate increase in the wages of casual workers, at more than 3% per annum, it also reports decline in the real wages of regular workers, with a sharper decline among urban regular workers..
Thus, using disaggregated data from national accounts, the real income of farmers actually declined at 4.4% per annum between 2018-19 and 2021-22, with real income in 2021-22 about 13% lower than what it was in 2018-19..
. Clearly, multiple data sources suggest a decline or at best a deceleration in the income earned by working Indians in the last five years..
While claims of increasing incomes and declining poverty can always be justified as political rhetoric during an election year, ignoring the reality of distress among vast multitudes of working Indians is unlikely to help the recovery of an economy that is emerging too unevenly from a pre-pandemic slowdown followed by a covid contraction in an uncertain global environment..
