 We are already seeing green shoots when it comes to economic recovery. Today, the day of Babri demolition and Ambedkar's death anniversary, let us renew our pledge towards secularism, democracy, and the struggle for real concerns of the people to stand against the divisive politics of hate and bigotry that underlines this regime's communal idea of nation. On behalf of Centre for Financial Accountability and NewsClick, I welcome you all to Economy Pei Chercher. This is a discussion series aimed at allowing more public discussions around the issues of finance that touch each of our pockets and prospects. Emerging from the hardships of the lockdown, the complacency, and the debacle of handling the second wave of the pandemic, the government is keen on building new and positive narratives to erase the memories of death, distress, and debt, and moving on a war path to favouring big capital through policies like privatisation and monetisation. The first series of Economy Pei Chercher looks at the claims of rapid recovery and record growth for the Indian economy. While in the first and the second sessions of the series, we interrogated several of these numbers and the government steps towards recovery. In this third session, we will try to fathom what these so-called claims of recovery have actually meant for the people. Today is the third session of the series titled What has recovery actually meant for the people? And on 10th December, we will discuss what should have been a people-centric recovery. The series is moderated by Paranjay Guha Takuta and we are very grateful that he has agreed to anchor this series with us. He's a senior journalist but he is not just one of... that is just one of his many hats. His main area of interest are working of the political economy and the media in India and the world, on which he has written and also made documentary films. He is a writer, speaker, anchor, interviewer and teacher. He has also served as editor of the Economic and Political Weekly and he has been a consultant with NewsClick. I hand over the stage to Paranjay for his initial remarks and introducing the panellists for today and for taking the conversations forward. Paranjay. Thank you so much Priya. It's my honour and my privilege to anchor this, the third in a series of discussions that we've had which look at different aspects of the working of the Indian economy. And we've taken a critical look at the working of the country's economy and we've tried to dissect the claims that have been made by the government and demystify a lot of hype that is there. The first in the series of discussions took place with the professors Deepa Sinha, Suraji Das, Shatuki Roy and in that discussion we essentially looked at the macroeconomic issues and why the claims that have been made by the government do not really stand close, scrutiny. And in the second discussion there was a focus on issues relating to the national monetization pipeline, disinvestment and issues relating to the manufacturing sector. And we had on that occasion professors Chiro Shridhas Gupta, professor Suraji Mazumdar and senior journalist V Sridhar. We're going to take our conversation forward with this discussion which will once again revisit some of the macroeconomic issues that had been touched on earlier. And we're hoping we'll be able to add new, throw new light on some of the issues that were already touched on by the speakers. And we're going to focus on issues relating to jobs, to employment and what the recovery has meant or not meant for the underprivileged sections of Indian society. We have two speakers with us. The third speaker, Rakshita Swami, unfortunately could not be present on this occasion because there was a medical emergency in her family. But I'm very happy to welcome Rinalini Jha. She is from the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru. Her research is focused on the economics of discrimination and unequal opportunities in economic well-being, the impact on growth. She's looking at wage polarization over the skilled spectrum of workers and its intersection with other social identities. And she's part of the state of work in India report team in Azim Premji University. Thank you so much, Rinalini, for being a part of our discussion. And I'm going to be asking you several questions, including questions on the macroeconomic situation in the country. And joining us here is Kinjal Sampath. Kinjal is a researcher. She is based in Delhi. Her work focuses on urban social protection, issues relating to income security, housing, the domestic workers. And she's a sociologist by training and it's good to have a sociologist because so far these discussions have been dominated by economists and it would be good to have her perspective on these issues. She has in the past been associated with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies here in Delhi, as well as the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bengaluru. And she has also been working closely with the Jaipur-based Rajasthan-Mahila-Kamgaari Union and they're also looking at the impact of the post-COVID recovery's impact on domestic workers. So the way we'll structure our conversation is roughly like this. I'm going to ask a few set of questions to Rinalini and then Kinjal will intervene in our discussion with her comments and remarks. Then I'm going to ask one another set of questions to Kinjal and Rinalini should feel free to intervene. So I mean, if we look at some of the macroeconomic fundamentals, I mean we have here the government, spokesperson's, you know, waxing eloquent about how optimistic they are and how they've kept both inflation under control. I mean, many people would completely disagree with that contention, but we had the Chief Economic Advisor, Dr. K.V. Subramaniam claiming, I quote him, India has strong macro fundamentals as the three most important parameters. Inflation, current account deficit and fiscal deficit are under control. He added that India is one of the few major economies that has shown four consecutive quarters of growth, which is noteworthy in a once in a century pandemic. And the country of course registered growth in the third and fourth quarters of the previous financial year and in the first and second quarters of the current financial year. And he is claiming that we can now consistently start seeing the country's gross domestic product above the pre-pandemic level. So far, he hasn't commented very much on jobs. He hasn't commented very much on a whole lot of issues. But on inflation, he has made a few comments and I'll be coming to that. But here we have a situation and I'd like to ask Dr. Nalini to talk about this. You look at economic activity and future expectations. I mean, the Niti IO like the government of India is very, very optimistic. You know, at the same time, they are acknowledging that consumer sentiment is not really what it used to be. If you compare the second quarter numbers issued by the government, the numbers for the period July, August, September of 2021 and compare that with the corresponding period of the previous year, we see fairly sharp drops in private final consumption expenditure, 7.7%. We see a drop in gross final consumption expenditure of the government itself, 8.3%. And of course, capital gross fixed capital formation is down by 8.2%. So where is the reason for optimism is the question that I'm going to put to Nalini. Please. Thank you and thank you for also having me on this panel. So as this audience would already be familiar with, the last two sessions did talk significantly substantially on GDP and the numbers and the mystery behind these claims. I'll try to bring in some new angle to it by talking about the components of GDP and how they have changed, what kind of growth they have seen in the second quarter of this financial year as compared to last year and also the year before last, that is 2019. So let me begin from the beginning that GDP for the second quarter in this financial year was 8.4% more than it was in the same quarter last year, that is 2020 same months. Now, as we all know, GDP has four main components. It has consumption, private spending, government spending and net exports. So I won't go into net exports. I'll talk about the remaining three components. And let me start with consumption. Now consumption is the biggest component of GDP about 55% of GDP and this part of GDP grew by 8.6% over this quarter last year. So if you compare this quarter's consumption component with last year's same quarter, it has grown by 8.6%. But as has been spoken in the earlier two sessions also, the low base effect is playing out. Now I'll just repeat what that means. Essentially what it means is that GDP in this quarter last year had contracted by more than 11%. And private consumption in the second quarter this year was significantly lower than it was in the same quarter two years ago, that is 2019, the pre-pandemic year. So if I put it very simply, people are spending less this year than they did in the same quarter two years ago. That is the situation with consumption, the biggest component of GDP. Now, let me move to the second component which is... I'm just interrupting you because your voice, there was a break in what you said. You are essentially arguing that private consumption is yet to reach the pre-COVID level, am I correct? Absolutely, absolutely. So I can actually quickly just repeat one sentence, hopefully that will make it clear to the audience who missed it. People are spending less this year than they did in the same quarter two years ago, which is the correct comparison to make because then you are literally, you're actually comparing it with the pre-pandemic levels. So that is the state for the biggest component of our GDP. If I talk about the second component, which is the second biggest component, 33% of GDP comes from private investment. Now, this is a good indicator because it grew by 11% this quarter and it easily surpassed last year, this year's contraction of 8.6%. So last year I contracted by 8.6%. This year it grew by 11%. So it was surpassed. In fact, what is even more positive is that firms need more investments in this quarter two than in any quarter two over the last five years. So that actually indicates that firms were very optimistic about India's economic recovery. That is why they were willing to put in money, pumping money into their investment ventures. So in the last five years, this was the highest investment in the second quarter. And now let me come to the third component, which is government spending. Now, the surprising thing is that if we keep aside last year, which was an exceptional year, government had to increase its spending. Government's expenditure actually has been the lowest in the last five years, this quarter. And this shows that at a time when private demand is struggling to recover, the government has not been able to plug the gap. All of this discussion that I, all of whatever I have spoken so far about GDP actually is very neatly explained in one of the explained pieces in the Indian Express. So actually if people are keen on following this up further, just the GDP discussion, it's a great resource to go back to. However, I'll move on from GDP and I'll actually also want to talk a little bit about cross value addition or GVA. And this is not actually specific to only this quarter. I had written a piece for after the release of the GVA numbers from the last quarter of last financial year. That means the beginning of 2021. Now, this was again in the Indian Express with my colleague Rosa Abraham. And if some of us might remember, there was this, a lot of noise was being made on how there has been a 15% growth in the GVA of construction sector. And it was much talked about and of course it certainly brought a lot of relief to the policymakers. But what we did was that we tried to disentangle the meaning of this 15% growth, what it really boils down to for the workers, for actual people. And upon closer inspection, we found that even as the GVA growth was 15% in the construction sector, the corresponding growth in employment in the construction sector was only 2%. And it was actually half of its growth in the last year. That is the first finding. We also find that earnings in the construction sector, which is such a, so after all, you know, at the end of the day, it is about incomes. It is about how much people earn. And I would want to spend some time on it later in the discussion that how incomes have recovered and how they were impacted. But earnings in the construction sector had actually declined by nearly 8%. And remember, this is happening along with the 15% GVA growth. So we see that employment was 2%, which was half of its growth last year. Earnings had declined by 8%. Additionally, even labor share had declined by a magnitude of 14%. So the point that we were trying to make in that article, which I think is still relevant today, is that it is not prudent to rely on growth alone to deliver economic suffer to the labor force. We have to go beyond the GDPs and the GVAs and actually come to indicators and other parameters like income, like employment, which will actually help us identify what is the current status of well-being of people in the economy. Let me ask you another question and thereafter, I'll get hingell into our conversation. Now, there are some claims that have been made by the government and I can't figure out how these claims are being made. We have a report on the Niti Iyog which is saying that it's at one level it's hedging. It's calling with the resumption of economic activity, future economic expectations turn optimistic. However, currently reduced incomes and low consumer sentiment may result in lower spending in the near term. At one level, they are acknowledging that there is a dampening and a considerable damping of consumer demand. Then it goes on to say there's thus transitory support to incomes and let liquidities crucial to support consumption and ensure economic recovery. The government has been, according to the Niti Iyog, very cognizant of this problem and very proactive and several reforms to support incomes have been initiated during the lockdown, including relaxations and extensions to support exporters, credit support to agricultural supply chain, respite for salary employees. We have in October, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitaraman announcing measures worth 73,000 crores to stipulate consumer spending. One of the components is that Payment Euro LTC, the leave travel concession given to government employees, it has been given in cash and 10,000 festival advance has been given to government employees. Now, the question is, though Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a tweet said these are very timely moves will boost demand in the economy and consumer demand is supposed to go up by 200%. It is supposed to have risen by 200% during between March and May in the second phase compared to last year when there was according to their court certain surveys. Now, I'm asking you to look at the credibility of the figures. You know, you talked about the base effect. I mean, let's look what the government itself has conceded. In April, May and June of 2020, the economy shrank by almost 24%. Then in the next three months, July, August, September, according to the government of India, it continued to shrink by about 7.5% if I'm not mistaken. So how are these claims being made? What is the basis for making these claims that, you know, consumer sentiments are reviving consumer spending is going to go up. I mean, where do these numbers come from? I mean, consumer demand rose more than 200% during March and May according to a survey. I can't make out how this survey and what is the basis, please. I'm afraid I am myself a bit puzzled by because all these statements are coming together. And I see how it is going to how it can potentially lead to a rise in consumption in consumer demand. But the fact of the matter is that if you look at the GDP numbers, which are official numbers, right, there is no issue of it's it's as the I think Shirogi Das was saying in the first session that if you believe the numbers from before you ought to believe the numbers from today. So what lies ahead of us is that, well, GDP has grown in this quarter by 8.4%. But it is also a fact that even as consumption has grown by 8.6%. So if you only focus on the growth as compared to the last year, perhaps this statement can make sense. It has indeed grown by 8.6% over the over this quarter last year. But what is very conveniently perhaps missed out, which is also causing all this confusion amongst people like you and me is that there is no people are not being cognizant of the magnitude of drop which was witnessed last year in this quarter. And if you see it without putting into account without putting in context the contraction the early contraction and the later recovery. I'm afraid you will perhaps end up making such statements which are factually incorrect. I'll add another point to it which is slightly it's not exactly on GDP, but when I talk about income, I'm hoping to make this point. I'm hoping to make a better argument. I'm hoping to present a better argument on why it is absolutely critical that we pay a lot more attention to the impact or the suffering which happened last year in order to honestly address any definition of recovery. If we are only going to talk about recovery, it is going to be a problematic situation, but I'll wait for my turn. I'm going to ask you to briefly comment on one aspect and then we'll move to Kinjal and this is the sole issue of inflation. Now once again, we know how a lot of the inflation that has taken place in the recent past has been driven by high prices of diesel and petrol. And now after the election results by election results came out, we weren't exactly favorable to the government. You found the prices had been brought down a little before the three controversial farm laws were abrogated. Now here, let me give you a quote from a spokesperson of the Bharti Janta Party, Mr. Gopal Krishna Agarwal. He is the person who comments on the economy a lot. He says oil and commodity prices are increasing across the world. No, there's some side of easing, but yes, US inflation is at the 30 year high of 6.2%. And this is a result of the economic policies followed by leading nations of the world in order to fight the economic fallout of COVID-19, which included large scale quantitative easing policies such as printing currency and helicopter money. And these policies are now being termed as misplaced. And the government according to Mr. Gopal Krishna Agarwal, the government's approach to inflation is such that it remains controlled. There is headroom for the RBI, the Reserve Bank of India to adjust monetary policy to expand demand, which will ensure that the Reserve Bank of India is not compelled for knee jerk reaction to suck large scale liquidity or increase benchmark interest rates. You know, I mean, how do you react to what is being said? People would argue that inflation is already very high and this inflation is not demand driven. It is not demand for inflation. It is cost with inflation. And here I'd like Kinjal also to comment, inflation hurts the poor. And when inflation, there is the food inflation is a substantial part of the increase in prices. It hurts the poor even more because they spend a higher proportion of their earnings on food. And it also widens inequalities. So I'd like a comment from Nalini and then Kinjal, your views. I'm afraid perhaps I'm not the best person to comment on specifically inflation. But again, I think I'll go back to my earlier point. So the gentleman has made a statement that everything is within control given the world statistics. Now, if I'm going to identify the impact on inflation through consumption and the impact and the component of consumption in our GDP, and I'm again going to only see that there is indeed a growth seed. So prices have been rising between last year and this year, especially fuel prices have been rising between last year and this year. And that has of course repercussions on everything that we are consuming as consumers. However, along with this inflation, there is also a close to more than 8% increase in consumption demand. If you're going to only look at these two statistics in isolation without putting any, without giving any heat to any kind of negative impact, which was suffered by the entire economy last year, then you are well within your rights to say that, well, there was inflation, but there was also a rise in consumption. So as a policymaker, I would think that things are fine. And it's not really having a negative impact on individuals consumption, which would have not seen an increase, rather it would have gone down had there been a negative impact on inflation. But having said that, I'm sure perhaps Kinjal will add more statistics. That's right. We would like your comments on what, I mean, so far the discussion has been between me and Rinaldi. You've been patiently listening to us. We'd like your comments on what has been discussed so far, your observations, please. Absolutely. And I'll pick your point on inflation and I'll also pick what Rinaldi ended the previous section with, which was how we define recovery is the central question here. And what other statistics do we need to triangulate with? But also what I will try and bring to this conversation is the flesh and blood of what recovery looks like on ground. What kind of immediate mid and long-term impacts can we see because of that initial impact that was there? So let me start with the inflation and I think we can conclude that the inflation is arising from exogenous factors that have nothing to do much with public spending in the way that one always finds a way to kind of differ social protection with. It is coming at a time when employment is at the lowest. So let me quote, what is last month's CMIE labour force participation? It is 40 from 43. We are going down to 38. It's been up and down. It's been extremely jagged and that's not a good sign. We celebrate the highs prematurely. And we should be careful about that. I'm interrupting you very briefly. Kinjal, please explain for the benefit of those who are listening to you this concept of the labour participation thing. What does it mean? I mean, explain that we are actually seeing a lowering of the labour force and a larger number of people who have stopped looking for jobs in that sense. Please explain. Sure. And I think it is important for people to understand these two statistics. One is the labour force participation rate and one is the unemployment rate. Looking at it, it looks impressive. A growing country like India with 7% or lesser unemployment rate. Look at how we calculate it. Anyone who has not received a single penny over the year and is not looking for a job is actually unemployment. Whereas labour force participation is actively looking for a job. When you see labour force participation is calculated only for people within the working age population and who actually are looking for jobs or are presently employed in any form. They could be contractual. They could be industrial outworkers. If they got remunerated for their jobs, they're counted as part of the labour force. Now that is down from 43 to 39%. Mahesh Vyas, who had CMIE, definitely considers the lowering of labour force participation as a sort of dejection among the existing labour force of actually looking for a job but not finding one and giving up the hunt for looking for a job. Now this is when you kind of juxtapose this against the growth figures. I think that bridge between what recovery looks like on charts and what recovery looks like in people's lives. So that is one. But I want to go back for a minute to what Minalini said about impact and about how do we define the idea of recovery and a lot of kind of discussion has gone on about actually going back to the same income levels or the LFPRB bouncing back to what it was. And it's important to know what macro figures explain and what they hide. And for that, if I may have the liberty to pull up a graph I had shared earlier, I want to kind of introduce this idea. So we went around and I'll come back to the specifics of this, but I want to introduce four ideas to this conversation we are having. You're seeing income, household income. You're seeing personal income on this graph. The household income is the yellow line. The dotted yellow line is the personal income of the domestic worker, but right now the domestic worker doesn't matter. This is a conceptual conversation I'm having. What we did was if you see the incomes bounce, do not bounce back, but kind of our own their way to recover, have a nice sort of U shaped curve as one would expect in a pandemic. But what plateaus and drops is what we define as savings and debt induced. So the purple line that you see which is dropping rapidly and then almost plateauing is people's savings minus the debt that they have incurred. And I'd like to draw your attention to the difference between my colleagues and I at the IIHS consider this difference between the yellow line and the purple line on this graph as perhaps a possible way to look at recovery in a more meaningful way. People stand on the ground and that ground erodes due to an impact. Going back to same income levels barely takes them especially in the case of domestic workers and other such employments that are not highly paid back into the everyday rigmarole without actually paying for that initial shock. And that initial shock already has started having its long-term effects. We can drop the graph and I'll pull it up later. But I'd like to bring forth these ideas of it's not important to just talk about recovery and back to what it was, but the idea of the eroded ground of resilience that people are standing on. Okay, Kinjal. Maybe you should speak a few words on why we in this country have had no alternative but to become dependent on data pertaining to jobs, employment, the labor force on a private agency like the CMI center for monitoring Indian economy. And one of the reasons is because the government itself has not just been dirty but at times it appears most reluctant to put out information on this topic the periodic labor force survey. And we are also aware of what happened not very long ago in two members of the statistician. The government actually put in their papers because they were most unhappy on the manner in which government agencies that are supposed to put out figures, statistics, the central statistics office and so on and so forth. Now called the national statistics office. So maybe you can talk a little bit about this and then I'm going to come back to you on issues relating to the job market. Definitely. So it's interesting that GDP and GVAs have become a normal parlance in our breakfast tables and not unemployment rate and not labor force participation and not the polarization of the recovery that we have seen which are much more closer to people's lives than what the abstraction of a GDP and a GVAs is actually very difficult to fathom. What these figures do is able is actually in a way enable you to provide evidence to provide teeth to provide a lens to unpack very abstracted figures like the GDP and the GVA and understand if as I think rightly pointed out you could be a growing economy with a growing unemployment unemployed workforce. These are not oxymorons and unless we see them in juxtaposition to each other, we are not going to be able to understand or make sense of any of these figures even if it is collected systematically. Forget the labor force participation survey when was the last good data given on let's say the micro small and medium industry. 2015-16 we have the NSSO survey and after that we have no reliable data on MSMEs itself. So I'm not even going down to the level of the labor. Let's look at small capital. We don't collect data around small capital properly because big figures obscure as much as they explain. And unless you do not have those smaller figures to actually juxtapose and triangulate, it's difficult to actually tell the full story. Brinalini, would you like to add to anything that has been said so far? Would you like to add to the observations and comments made by Pinjal Sampath? I would actually. Let me begin by saying that I'm very thankful to Kinjal for giving us some evidence on debts on growing indebtedness because it is really going to weave very well into the narrative which I have on impact and recovery of household and individual incomes. And I think Kinjal's graph will really add to my point. But I'm not sure. Do you want me to go into the income discussion? Why not? Please go ahead. And if you like, we can show that graph which we showed a little while back once again. Sure. I'll let the team know when to pull that out. But let me just begin. As I said, I'll be talking about both household and individual incomes. And to understand recovery, we ought to first identify the impact of the pandemic and its varying magnitude for the different kinds of people. And in what I'm going to be talking about, I'm hoping that everyone will agree that the magnitude does vary and it's important that we go beyond the overall statistic. So let's begin by looking at the All India impact, which of course is bound to hide more than reveal. But nevertheless, I think it's a good starting point. So if I look at the per capita household incomes in constant terms at the All India level, this figure hit the lowest in April 2020, which was the first month of nationwide lockdown. However, it actually then recovered almost entirely by January 2021. So per capita household incomes were almost entirely recovered by January 2021, only to again go down with the coming of the second wave. So of course, we already know this. There was a double whammy. I'll now go a step ahead and look at the impact by different sectors. So how did the per capita household income look like for different sectors? By sectors I mean rural and urban sectors. And already by just going this one step ahead from All India to the sectors, we find differences which would have remained hidden if we had only focused on the All India statistics. So what we find is that first, the urban sector's economies were far worse hit by the first wave. And even before the coming of the second wave, the income levels were far below the average pre-pandemic income levels. So even before the second impact began, incomes had not recovered after the first wave. This is the first wave story. We also find that the impact of the second wave was felt more significantly in the rural sectors. So already we see different people are suffering differently as against the All India statistics. And now I'll move one step further ahead and look at the impact by class. By class I mean income class. And we actually find evidence for a regressive impact of the pandemic. What I mean by that is that the rich were impacted proportionately lesser than the poor. So just to make sure that everyone is on the same page, I'll spend a minute in talking about how we actually do that. How are we claiming that there's a regressive impact? So to do this, we categorize households into different income bins on the basis of their average incomes in 2019, which was a pre-pandemic year. So once we have households categorized into different income bins, then we track them over time. So once we have a poor household on the basis of 2019 income, we track them over time and so on and so forth. May I please request my crafts to be put on the screen. And yes, there you are. So I think it'll be nicer for everyone to follow what's really happening. So what we see on this graph, remember I'm talking about income distribution by class, by income categories. What we are seeing on this graph is the impact, which is the drop in incomes between February 2020 and April 2020, which was the impact of the first wave. I am showing this for all India, rural and urban sectors separately. And I'm showing this for four income quartiles. So what we mean by quartile one is that these are individuals belonging to households in the poorest 25% of the population. While quartile four is the richest 25%. Now I'll ask you to focus on two bars, the blue bars and the yellow bars. So if you look at the all India set of bars, which is the left most, what we are seeing is that the drop in incomes between February and April was much sharper for the poorest 25% as compared to the richest 25%. And if we actually go on to the urban sector, there we actually see a very clear monotonic trend. The poorest suffered the most followed by second quartile followed by third quartile and the least was by the top quartile or the richest 25%. You may please remove the graph for now. I'll get back to it later. Thank you. I mean, the main point I think that Bernalini is making to put it in very simple language. When the impact of the current state of the economy is impacting the poor sections more than the rich, we are seeing a widening of inequalities. Yes, please continue Bernalini. Thank you. Thank you. So that is for the, that is the impact, right? And I'll just add one more point to the impact. When we looked at the poorest, so this remember we are tracking households, right? So that's why we're calling it a aggressive impact. Now, if you look at the poorest households in the months of April and May 2020, the months of nationwide lockdown, we actually find that these households earned zero incomes. They earned zero incomes for two straight months. And it is absolutely imperative for us to understand this impact to now understand what recovery means which I'm coming to. So whatever numbers, of course, I should have mentioned this before, whatever numbers I'm presenting today is from CMI, CPHS, because it allows us to do this kind of an analysis. And I will only be talking about monitoring Indian economy. Indian economy. CPHS is the consumer service. Yes, please continue. Absolutely. Right. Now, recovery, which right now I will be talking about will be in terms of getting back to the pre-pandemic levels. Now, recovery actually was lagged for the richer people and it was quicker for the poorer people. But this is where we must become cautious in interpreting what the data is telling us. So what is the data telling us? The data is telling us that income levels for the poor recovered by the end of the first wave and beginning of the second wave. However, this finding is not really surprising. In fact, we do get matching stories from employment numbers too, which I can come to in the latter part of the discussion today. So recovered incomes and employment for the poor was bound to happen with the opening of the economy from the mere perspective of survival of these masses. Remember, these are groups of individuals who were making zero income for two straight months. So obviously, as soon as the economy began to open up, they will rush to get whatever jobs they can and start and begin to earn incomes, whatever they were earning. But it would be hugely fallacious to conclude that hence welfare of these households are back to at least the pre-pandemic levels because their income levels are back. We ought to remember, we absolutely must remember that the prolonged or the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will be very different for different people. And secondary data will be much more forthcoming in giving us evidence for lack of recovery on the basis of some relatively easy to measure parameters like income or like employment. So in this case, for example, individuals for whom incomes and employment are coming back at a slower but actually a steadier pace and steady because again of the nature of employment, which I will address later. But what she means hidden from this picture is that the poor who survived on zero incomes, how did they survive? On what means did they survive? These are, remember people with bare minimum or possibly zero savings, right? So consequently, they must have borrowed to sail through the months of no employment or equivalently months of zero income. Now, unlike income or employment, measuring indebtedness can be a very, very tricky business, especially for this population. And I'll tell you why I call it tricky because as I'm sure Kinjal will agree with me, it's these households are more prone to borrow from all kinds of informal sources. So the employers, family, friends, their neighbors. Exactly, exactly. Absolutely. Absolutely. You can't see it completely. I completely agree. And it's really important to identify the source. So what I'm trying to say is that measuring recovery only in terms of income and employment for such households is meaningless. Okay. Indebtedness. Very, very important point. Yes, please continue. I want to bring in Kinjal into our conversation. I'll just take maybe two minutes more to finish this set of arguments. So this is what I meant when I mentioned different long term impacts of the pandemic. For the rich, long term impact means getting back to employment and their earlier income levels at a more slow pace. Again, I will say perhaps a more steady base. For the poor, it could be reflected in greater indebtedness, which Kinjal has done a service to us all by showing us that graph that does action evidence for such kind of, such kind of borrowings. Further, I'll just make one more point between January and May. So this is now I'm coming to the second waves impact. What we find is that the middle two quartiles seem to be the worst affected in terms of income drops. Now I view this in terms of the finding of the Pew Research Center. I'm sure again, people will be familiar with this phrase that there is a shrinking of the Indian middle class. And the impact of the second wave actually shows us something similar. Where the middle 50% of the population are the worst affected in terms of the drops that we have witnessed in terms of incomes. So, okay, now while I'm sure this audience actually does not need to hear this, but I'll still repeat for the sake of completion of my argument that. Well, data should assist us in understanding what we need around us. Now if income data shows a quicker recovery for the poor, even as the poor around us continue to suffer from the aftermath of the lockdown and the pandemic, we have to reflect on other parameters to better define recovery. I think I've taken more time. Thank you. You made some very, very important observations. And before I get kindled into our conversation, I want to make a few general observations. I made these before in the earlier discussions. What we saw in the months from the 24th of the night of the 24th of May, 2020, and it continued for at least three months. Once was the biggest internal migration in the history of this country, far more than what we saw in the 40s when the continent was subdivided. And I would even argue that this is the biggest internal migration seen anywhere in the history of humankind. We don't have the numbers. We have a lot of anecdotal evidence, including evidence from the surveys done by the Azim Premji University. But we can quibble about the numbers, whether there were three crores or two crores or five crores. But what was truly amazing was the reason manner in which government spokespersons lied, and I'm consciously using the word. On the 31st of March, 2020, in a submission to the Supreme Court of India, the Chief Justice of India, then headed by Justice Sharad Boukde, the Solicitor General of India, Tushar Mehta, put out a statement by the Union, the Secretary of the Minister of Home Affairs, who had the temerity to say there's not a single migrant on the highways of this country. I'm just repeatedly flagging this point because, you know, look at what we are being told. We are seeing this bounce back. The World Bank has told us that 95% of those of the December 2019 workforce are back at work or were back at work in August of 2020. We have these household surveys, and already Minalini has talked about these, that these are supposed to enable us to compare what individual households are doing. The Consumer Pyramids Household Survey of the CMIE, that measures the well-being of the 1.174,000 households across a range of indicators, at a relatively high frequency. Now, what we are seeing is a put on good remarkable recovery. But as she has pointed out, and let me give you one set of statistics called from the CMIE data, there might be 4 crore, 40 million fewer people who are presently, who are at present employed than before the pandemic. I mean, this is huge in a country like ours. Kinjal, over to you. Yeah. Thank you for enjoying. Let me take you to a slightly better scenario and give the government a chance. So let me go in now with the survey we did, which was with the domestic workers. And it's a panel survey. What's a panel survey? You'll go back to the same people at two different points in time. We went in March when the lockdown happened. It was a phone survey done by domestic workers themselves. And we go back in November. Out of 500, we are able to trace back 360. So these are clearly semi-permanent migrants who are present, who don't lead the city in light of actually losing their jobs. And now let's look at what happens to them. Only 15% of them get PDS, you know, public distribution system. They get some food assistance and 83% of them get assistance from the union that they are attached to. They are document poor. They didn't get cash transfers till about the second wave. And the food assistance only came to 15% of them through the actual public distribution channel. Let me look at what we spoke about income recovery in February 2020, right before the pandemic starts. And I urge you to take this note in its specificity because we have stress tested it against many different sectors. And it seems to be a story that is coming out again and again. So in February 2020, the monthly income is way above 8,000 rupees. It has fallen down to 5,000 at the end of October and November 2020. What we see in our case is actually quite contrary to many other studies. And I can understand why because domestic work is a very feminized work that women return to work early. But their income plateaus and never returns back. And here I want to make a bigger point. Where is that coming from? And this is important to understand. There is not just contraction of work, which is what we have been talking about. But there may be actually compression of wages. And if that is the case, then we would be actually reversing a lot of work that is done by grassroots organizations within the informal sector for labor to enter the labor market, which is extremely asymmetrical and kind of stacked against them. So in our data, this kind of drop in income is not just coming because they are getting less work. It is coming from all three sources. They're doing less number of houses. They're doing less number of tasks and the wages per task themselves have fallen. And it is the latter that I worry about the most because that is your negotiating capacity. And when you're standing on a very thin ground of resilience, I wonder how the labor goes in and negotiates the terms of work. And so this is to give the flesh and bone to the numbers that we have been talking about, that Grinnellini constantly alluded to. Apart from that, I think we spoke about the short, mid, and long-term impacts. And let's look at the choices one makes when in dire need. So Mevabhati, who's the union leader I spoke to in an interview, said one of the biggest impacts she sees is a drop out in a very high drop out of women, girls, between the ages of 14 and 18 from schools and taking up jobs that are fairly dead end. And in fact, those jobs pay much lesser than minimum wage and only women actually take it up. So there's a gender asymmetry there that is very, very pronounced. The other mid-term effect one can see and which can easily translate into long term is the consumption of the kind of food, the palate, the total plateau, complete, you know, downward, so it is much more now grain based as compared to meat and fish based. These are Bengali workers in Rajasthan, so a lot of the food variety was fish and meat and eggs. There is absolutely none of that anymore. It has been, you know, they've been consuming it less than half from what they used to in pre-pandemic levels. So one can only imagine what is going to be the long term effect on nutrition growth and related issues. So I say that what we need to then talk about is both, as I said, resilience to come back to the same point. The unevenness of recovery, some of them will get plateaued. We definitely see a gendered recovery happening. And also what are going to be these choices that people are going to make or will have to be forced to make the hardly choices that will actually haunt them for life in terms of the life chances they could have had, had there been enough social protection against this wave of pandemic. Okay. Brinalini, would you like to add to what Kinjal has said because after this I want to move to another theme. We've already talked about, you referred to the Q report on the shrinking middle class. What would look a little bit at white collar jobs and the middle class jobs a little bit, but before that please comment or add to what Kinjal has said so far. Thank you. I'll do both. Actually, if you don't mind, I want to begin by just substantiating whatever Kinjal has presented through her primary data work through some secondary data stuff that we have. And then I'll also actually in the theory, like while I do that, I'll talk about some nature of jobs, which I think perhaps what you have in mind, I'll enjoy that what kind of jobs really are coming back or not. So, again, my, whatever I'm talking about is whatever I'm talking is based on CPHS consumer pyramid households serving. So, again, see if we talk about the impact of the pandemic on employment, what is known to us all is that there were massive job losses and income cuts across the board. Workforce participation rate WPR. So this is the number of individuals employed as a proportion of the population of working age people that has almost entirely recovered to the pre pandemic levels by August 2021. Again, we have to be cautious that this lump sum number actually hides a lot of churn, which is happening within the labor market. If I could again have my slides please, it would be just nicer for people to understand. Thank you. So let me just talk about the gender impact which Kinjal was talking about. So what we saw was all level WPR is kind of back and things look fine. But the impact of the first few was actually felt very differently for male and female workers. My, again, my colleagues at the center, Rosa Abraham, Amit Basore and so VK sir. They have a paper where they show that conditional on being in the workforce prior to the pandemic. Women were seven times more likely to lose work during the nationwide lockdown as compared to men. And conditional on having lost work, they were 11 times more likely to not return to work subsequently compared to men. So the first thing we are seeing is that the impact was felt more acutely by female workers. But Analini, sorry for interrupting and I'd just like to point out and I'm taking this liberty because this is the big survey that is doing that. We add a third layer to what you say and I thought it was important that I interrupt at this point that even when women return to work, at least from the surveys that we have done, that income takes much longer, they face a much more protracted recovery than men in getting back to the same income levels. So in a way that is for me the third arrow in these two conditions, which is saying that even if you were to return to work, will you return back to the wage levels that you were at is actually much more protracted than men. Sorry for interrupting, but I thought. No, please, thank you. Thank you that actually makes this richer. So that's actually adds another like a third argument on why it's more difficult for the women workers in our economy. I will link this graph with the income story. So remember how I was talking about the poorer have seen a quicker recovery while the richer are seeing a more lag recovery. Notice that the poorer are also likely to be in more precarious kinds of jobs. So casual work, daily wage, self-employed. While the richer, we will expect more of them to be in regular salaried jobs. Now this graph is by one of my colleagues the center and what it shows is that think of the permanent salaried workers or the salaried workers from December. December 2019, that's a pre-pandemic time. This graph is actually showing how many of those remained permanent salaried. And you notice that after this dip in April, it's kind of a dim trilly recover, right? Even by August, only 48% of the erstwhile permanent salaried workers remained permanent salaried. And this actually fits very well with the income story. So here another angle comes in that the kind of jobs which are coming back at a faster pace are the more precarious kinds of jobs. The daily wage work and the self-employed work. I'll bring in a third and perhaps one of the most important angles that of age. We find that the youngest worker during the lockdown. And the employment levels are not fully recovered even now unlike for workers from older age groups. In fact, if you look at workers below 23 years of age, at least half of them did not recover at all from a loss of employment during the lockdown period. So we wonder that where did they go, right? We want to see where did these workers go in the pandemic. So even as the employment trajectory shows us that nearly 50% of these young workers were no longer employed, we actually do not see a corresponding increase in unemployment rates. So especially in the developing country context, it does not make a lot of sense to look at the unemployment rates because people will just not be in the market. So actually many of these young workers have left the workforce and a large share of these erstwhile employed, remember, young workers are now reporting themselves as students. So of course, we have a lot of trouble. And I can briefly intervene. What you're saying, why it is significant? If we look at a big picture out of 1.35 billion, 135 crore, which is supposed to be the current population of India. Half, half your population around half is below the age of 27, the median age of India is around 27. So we know India is a young country and so these figures that you've shown are very, very important, very, very significant. Yes, please continue. Thank you. And I was saying a large share of these erstwhile employed young workers are now reporting themselves as students. Now, while some level of transition back to education is expected, it happens every year. But in the last year, this has been at a much higher share than in the normal year, say 2018. That was a normal year. And the kind of transition we have seen last year was much higher than what we see in the regular year. Now, because so in CPHS at least it is not possible for us to find if this is actually indicative of an actual move to education just because they're reporting themselves as students. But it sure is suggestive of large masses of young people sitting idle. And if I take the liberty of just opposing this with other evidence of massive increase in enrollment rates, this actually indicates a fall in LFPR or Labour Force participation rate for workers in this age group. So let me pause, like actually stop there. The idea being this of course all I'm adding to what Kincher has already spoken that even in terms of, of course in terms of recovery, but even in terms of impact, the difference is very, no matter what slice you want to do, you want to look at ruler, but you want to look at sex, you don't want to look at age cohorts. You want to look at the kind of jobs these people are doing. Relying on lump sum number across parameters is not a good idea. And stop there. I would like. Yes, please go and go. Yeah, no, I would like to add to my Nalini is just last sentence and where should we look for if not in the big numbers to complete the story. And I think there are three levels quite much that one can look at. One is the your overall GDP, GVA levels. Second to it is look at your sort of recovery of MSME sector, you know, which actually tells you a lot more about domestic production, domestic demand than anything else. And the third layer of it is what we talked about in the detail today, which is an individual sort of based indicators of labor force participation and employment rate, but also consumption and the unevenness of it. All I want to say is that the story of it has to be written in the unevenness of it rather than the, you know, sort of instead of making it averaging it out with bigger numbers. Right. Let me make a brief intervention here. I'm going to come to some of the questions that have been raised by Himanshu Damle, Aurobasu and others. But I want to just make a brief intervention on this whole issue of white collar jobs. And once again, it depends on who you're looking at and what data you're crunching. If you look at LinkedIn data, or if you look at data from knockery. You are, there would be one section who would be painting a rather optimistic picture. And for instance, LinkedIn talks about 60% year on year increase in the number of active openings for white collar professions in September. And then they're looking at company boards and so on and so forth. And it goes on further to say, hiring action in the first nine months of 2021 was nearly 40% higher than the corresponding period of last year of 2020, despite a temporary pause because of the second. Now, are we seeing what has been claimed as a sustained growth in hiring activity? I mean, again, depending on who you talk to, who are these job market experts, who are these top company executives, who are saying that now business activity is picking up, we are going to see easing of restrictions, rise in consumption. And finally, hiring activity is recovering to what it was before COVID. Knockery's report shows that in August 2021, there was 89% annual hiring growth and hiring in 2021 had actually surpassed the pre-pandemic levels. So once again, let me ask both of you, how reliable or how, it's not just the accuracy of the statistics. How selective is this data? Who among you would like to comment or touch on this point? I can just talk briefly about it, whatever sense I can make of this, using the data which I have been using so much in the last one year, 1.5 years. CPH, perhaps I'll take the liberty, I think the audience here is already familiar that there are some dialogues around the representativeness of CPHS data, consumer pyramid household survey data. But if I go ahead and I do use the data after doing whatever checks, we think we didn't necessarily. And if I believe that data, I'm afraid we do not see, we see the opposite of actually what you just, what the statements that were made. Because, and this is what I was showing in one of the graphs actually for the permanent salary. So what CPHS does is it has four categories of employment, the kinds of jobs that you can have. It calls them as permanent salary, temporary salary, casual wage and self-employment. Now, permanent salaries are the ones who are the most likely to be the white-collared jobs that you're talking about. And they have seen, they've literally, they've actually stagnated. We can pull up that graph again if you want. But what that graph is actually showing is that I am actually seeing that of the, in very simple language, say there were 100 people who were in, who were permanent salary in December 2019. So that's clearly a pre-pandemic month, right? There will be any confusion on that. Out of those 100 people, how many remained 100? How, sorry, how many remained in permanent salary over time? It's as simple a graph as that. And what we see is, so of course there was a drop, right? In the, in April, of course there was a drop in the number of people. So there was a large number of people out of those 100 people who dropped out of being permanent salary. But it actually remained, it stagnated after that. So by the story that you just told us, the statements that you just read, it should have been a strong uptick, right? That it fell, but because there's such a huge demand for these white-collar jobs, it should have really shot up. But the graph from CPHS that actually shows us that it's kind of flattened while that for the more precarious jobs has actually recovered entirely. So I'm afraid CPHS at least does not give us this, it tells us the opposite story, one. And so we don't really have any other, I mean, it's either we collect better data which can help us get this information, which can, which is testable. It's not really based on any one statement made from one small fraction of the economy. Rather, it is representative of the economy at some level. So in its absence, I would say CPHS does not say that. I'm not sure where these figures are coming from. Akinjal, Ken. Yeah, sure. Akinjal, I'm sure you would like to add to what has been said. And one of the persons who is listening to you, watching you, Aru Basu, it seems to be confirming what Rinalini just said that the only kind of jobs which many young people are getting seem to be these part-time jobs are delivering goods, all the delivery persons. The people who are delivering on behalf of Amazon and Zomato and a whole lot of other such companies. Yes. I would like to actually say that Rinalini, well, there is a lot of debate about the representativeness of the CPHS or data. I would any day take it over the LinkedIn and the Nocary data. So I think just like we have the gradations in the, you know, the gray and the blue color, what we are seeing and this we are seeing for a long time is the gradation of the white color, which is we have always conflated the white color jobs as formal sector, formal employment. A lot of times we are seeing formal sector, informalized employment. What is that the Zomato person who's delivering at your doorstep is now very nicely called, what do they call them? They call them like their partners. They're supposed to be business partners. What they are in actually the NSSO has now come up with a really good term called dependent contractors, which is to say that they're so reliant on the model that they are tied to that actually there is no such thing as an independent contractor. They're completely dependent on that. So I would like to say that there is a gradation in that and we need it's high time we started talking about that that there is informalized employment in the formal sector. And what we may be seeing is again an outcome of the polarization we started this debate with. What kind of jobs and at what levels of remuneration are we seeing an uptick? Is it a little bit of the graph up there of that point one, you know, percent who's anyway going to do something on, you know, and stand to gain from anywhere the economy works or are we seeing it as a phenomena that is worth discussing because of its might and because of how well spread it is. So I think in terms of the quality of data sets, while we have concerns about the representativeness of the CPHS, again, I would like to say I would take that over the other two that are mentioned here for just the quality of it. But the other thing is, let us also start talking in a more nuanced fashion about white collar jobs. There are ultimate white collar jobs and then there are informalized jobs within the formal economy. Okay, I think you've made very, very important points. Brinalini, would you like to add anything because after that, you know, what we could do is go back to some of the big picture, the macroeconomic issues and then we can sort of wind up our conversation. And I'll take a question that has been there in the chat box. But Brinalini, would you like to add anything to what has been said so far and then to what Kinjal has said? I completely agree on all the points that she made. And I also, I back her up in the statement that yes, with all its caveats, especially because as researchers, we ensure that we do some basic checks before we put out results. If we find something in the data which is which is making us very uncomfortable, given what we are seeing around us, we just keep doing checks till we get something appropriate and reasonably okay before we release it. So with those checks, I completely agree with Kinjal that CPHS is certainly more reliable, primarily because I've worked with the data and have done those checks myself. So I'll just repeat that statement for the record. And if I may add a broader point on the political economy of this country, you know, the present regime is so desperate to show that they are not messed up things as badly as they have. But they sort of literally clutch at straws and cherry pick data and little bits and pieces of information to try and quote unquote paint a somewhat optimistic picture of what is happening around us. I mean, yeah, maybe you can fool some of the people some of the time. I don't know if all the people are being fooled all the time. But let me hear, ask, take a question that has been raised by Himanshu Damley. And it's really not directly linked to what we've been discussing of what we've had discussing quite a lot of our much of our discussion has been focused on issues of jobs employment and household incomes and individual incomes. And in a sense, we are sort of going back to where we started and looking at the bigger picture. And he says that he's convinced that most of the optimism that the government's rhetoric posits. It's due to high frequency indicators within the GDP, which have shown an uptick undoubtedly. But this growth or the so-called growth is without public investment, greater public or greater public expenditure. And how these numbers are being crunched and these numbers are being sliced and diced. And then his view is that fiscal policy, monetary policy, they have to work together. Otherwise, we're going to see economic paralysis. And he's also asked, what is the way forward? I mean, you have one section of people, the spokesperson of the government, the supporters of the present dispensation, you know, frequently talking about this growth rhetoric to innocence almost cover up what has gone wrong with the Indian economy. And we've discussed this in the earlier discussions. The Indian economy was slowing down even before the pandemic. Absolutely. And the recession, the first time in the history of this country, you had what Americans would call technical recession, negative growth into successive quarters. So to look at the big picture a little bit, government picking, slicing, dicing, taking data that suits their purpose and looking ahead a little bit. What should be the way forward? What should, according to you, the way forward? So I'll start with Gingel. And Gingel, take your time in speaking and let these also be your closing remarks. Sure. And after that, I'll go to Brinaldi. Yes, please. Yes, please. Over to you, Gingel. Yeah, thank you, Brinaldi. And thank you for editorializing it in a brilliant way that it brings us to this point, wherein it is almost self-evident that not just the impact of the COVID pandemic, but the domestic demand for the bottom 50%, the bottom medium of the country, unless that goes up, the elite demand is not going to get the cycle going. And I'm sorry, I forget the name of the gentleman. I think Himanshu put that up. Yes. Yes. And absolutely this growth without public expenditure is almost we are as if moving towards a Faustian bar game where we will kind of become these two countries that is absolutely polarized. An eroded middle to bottom and a very, very thin slice on the top. And that the more you polarized, you get the more difficult. I'm not an economist and I think you and Brinaldi can probably come in at this point, but it will be difficult to get that, you know, the cycle started. And let me come here with a more minor point, which is not minor point, very, I mean, equally substantive point, but from a specific data set that we have, which is and this is interesting and I'd like to put it forth. The union that I talked about earlier in Jaipur of the domestic workers always struggled to actually organize the workers because they would lay their responsibilities of social protection on their employers rather than the state. Post pandemic that has changed because the night and they come from a place of empathy. They actually say, and I'll say this in Hindi because I don't know how else to convey that. I'll definitely talk in Hindi. I'll definitely talk in Hindi. That I didn't get to work, so how will I get to work. Now this is an absolute cascading of that effect. A small silver lining to that is for the first time, at least the union we work with is now the members are kind of putting state at the center of social protection and saying here is where we need to be formalized. to have certain formal protection. But what I mean to say is, unless that consumption goes up, I don't see in any way the cycle restarting. And I just don't mean households. I also mean, again, I'll reiterate the point micro enterprises, which actually are 99% of the MSME sector. We will risk becoming much more of, yeah, I think this argument applies equally to micro enterprises as much as to households which have been parallelized by absolutely no ability to take credit. Let's, I mean, whom are we even fooling? But no resilience in light of shocks and not just one, but multiple shocks to actually keep the lamp burning. But I'm going to stop there and happy dance. You know, Kinjal, I also reiterate the point. All the data, all your analysis is pointing towards a winding of the gap between the rich and the poor in this country. You talk about two Indians. What happened to Veeth, after he talked about his two Indians, you know, and he was sort of demonized that there were first information reports calling for his arrest because he's allegedly defamed the country, the nation of 135 crore people. I mean, the reality is very, very stark and the reality is very, very harsh. So I mean, before I let you go on this, what would you, I mean, I want a few recommendations, suggestions the way forward. Yeah, I don't have few, I have one and which is you have to look at not just growth but bottom up growth. Unless that happens, unless it is from where growth begins, we are not going to see any trickle down. We are not going to see anything. And for bottom up growth to happen, public expenditure will have to be directed there and will have to kind of be a really concerted effort in actually investment in human resources, be it health education and actual income security. And I come here from my social protection work but I don't see us escaping this. And actually I'm saying this is going to be worse even for the top end, which is almost an apostene bug in the elite demand is not going to actually expand the pie as much as people are optimistic about. Unless there is bottom up growth that is happening, the growth in itself will not actually bridge the two India's at all. But I wonder if it will let the top, the top end of that two India also live in kind of, the kind of riches they imagine to be in. That's right. You know, and those engaged colonies can continue to be there. And you know, we talk about non-resident Indians. There is supposed to be one breed which are worse than NRIs and they're called RNIs, the resident non-Indians. And you know, they can be in their little enclaves where everything is looked after but what we are really seeing and I really appreciate the points that you made because they are very, very important that we are, I mean, if we ignore what is staring at us in the face and get caught by the rhetoric, the hype, the statistics that are put out to show that, you know, we haven't done all that badly and we will, things are looking up, then we'll be fooling nobody but ourselves. And at the end of the day, with the virtual disappearance of the middle part of India and the growing gap, we're gonna see more and more social tension and this would get reflected in various ways in the way our society works and so our economy works. So thank you so much for your very, very perceptive analysis and observations. And I'll ask Mrenali to give her concluding remarks and give her concluding views on what has to be the way forward as you have rightly pointed out, Kinjal, as a country we should be ashamed of the expenditure on healthcare, especially after the pandemic, on education. I mean, we lament that Bangladesh's social indicators are better than ours. I mean, what has our, what has successive governments including the present government done in this regard? Yeah, sorry, I'm kind of digressing a little bit but Mrenali, over to you. I'll try to link whatever I say right now with what I actually began, which was the macro picture, right? And you asked me to comment on what's happening with the GDP and I had talked about the components, right? And if you remember, I was talking about government spending and how it has been the lowest barring last year in five years. Now, going specifically to the way forward, what should be done? I think one of the, one of the, well, it was not a revelation but one of the things which got, which was re-emphasized was the importance of an employment guarantee scheme. So we found, we saw that during the pandemic, during the lockdown specifically, there was this enormous uptake in the, in demand for Manrega jobs, that's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. It went up to one crore, right? That was the magnitude of job demanded in the rural sector. And for some time now, we at the center along with several other eminent personalities have been asking for an urban employment guarantee program. And that becomes even more critical now that we have seen how badly the urban sector was impacted during the pandemic. So it actually builds a very strong case for, and actually there are states which already have implemented some kind of an urban employment guarantee scheme. And it builds a very strong case for us to pursue this in a very serious fashion because this is a sure shot way of ensuring two things. One, you're going to spend, you're going to spend in giving people jobs, right? And by doing so, you are actually putting money into their pockets, which is so important as we have seen through this entire discussion today in just giving them the purchasing power to go ahead and buy things which is going to be critical in reviving our economies. So there is a ton of literature now where we have built a very strong case for its implementation and actually gone into every detail of what can be the potential, what all can be the potential problems and how we can address them in the implementation of the scheme. But I think my one, and of course, we all are very grateful that the Anaj, the grain subsidy or the grain, not the subsidy, but the ration has been actually extended up to now. Now, Manthi, Gareeb, Kalyan, Yogyojna. Jee, Jee, Shukriya. It has been extended till March, which is great because I think it was still November and that also had got extended beyond March. But in addition to that, I think it is an urban employment scheme is a great way of ensuring that you are putting in money, you're putting in money into people's pockets, you're giving them employment, you're ensuring that it is going to feed back into the economy in terms of more demand, which is again going to actually help the increasing eye components. So remember that the private investment is actually going up because of people, because the private investors are optimistic about economics or the economy's growth. And it is going to all come crashing down if there is not actually an increase in demand, which can be ensured through this channel of employment. So that will be my, that will be my... Thank you. Thank you so much, Manalini. You and many others have repeated and re-iterated and argued the necessity for urban employment guarantee program and you have very, very cogently articulated the whole issue that look at the end of the day, you know, you talk about putting 6000 rupees in the Jantan Yojana and into the accounts, the bank accounts of those who are in rural areas. We've actually seen, as you pointed out, not just a sharp rise in the demand for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. I mean, this was the same Prime Minister, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015 described the same program, the Manrega, as Congress of God, a safaltaka pratik. That this was a symbol or an example of the failure of previous governments. And now the same government has had no choice, but to increase the scope of this contract, despite low budgetary outlays, despite the corruption in the scheme, despite the inadequate funds flowing to state governments, there have been many, many issues that we haven't, we've touched on in this discussion. We've, for the first time in the history of this country, or let me put it this way, for the first time, certainly in the recent history of this country, we've seen a reverse migration from urban areas to rural areas. So these are some of the big takeaways that we've had are panelists, Renalini Jha and Kinjal, in a very, very convincing manner, talked about what has gone wrong with the whole programs to create jobs, to create employment, the state of the economy. And I thank both of them for being with us on this, the third in the series of discussions. I'm on behalf of the Center for Financial Accountability and Newsweek, I'm extremely grateful to both of you for giving us your time and for explaining so many complex issues in such a cogent, lucid manner in which I think even people who are not economists will be able to understand. I want to thank Priya and Anirban and Ashish from the CFA and I also want to thank Suranya and Trinna from Newsclick for putting all this together, putting this into our program together. I want to alert all of you that what is from now on the 10th, if I'm not mistaken, yes, indeed, it's on Thursday, sorry, on Friday the 10th, we're gonna have one more, the last in this four-part series of discussions on the economy and looking at how the recovery can be made truly people-centric. That's what we're going to look at in the fourth and the last episode. So thank you both once again. Namaskar and I wish you all the best. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.