6/13/2023 0 Comments Wealth tracker login![]() Moreover, the data gets even more blurry as we go upscale. The Gini, however, compares huge chunks of a vast population, so it offers too distant a view to capture too much going to just a few people at the top of a pyramid. As Nageswaran and Balasubramanian argue, India’s income Gini coefficient-by which 1 signifies all of it earned by one person and 0 means everyone earns the same-could well have dropped as a result of fiscal transfers. Since inequality is a relative metric, we must look at how the rich fared. In ‘Our View’ published earlier (bit.ly/3ztAfPZ), we had written of pre-pandemic distress, covid as a worsener of it and of a smaller tax base as an anomaly that revealed dropouts: “This defies the usual pattern of emergence from poverty, by which we would expect the under ₹5 lakh group to swell." Even with upshifts counted, new entrants from below could not make up for that and while tax-sop claimants might have been numerous, the shortfall still suggests a base-level income crunch, as consistent with surveys like ICE360. Balasubramanian point out new tax benefits at this level of income and upward mobility to the next slab as likely explanations, with the earlier enlargement explained by a big formalization drive. Anantha Nageswaran and senior bureaucrat K. ![]() In a Mint op-ed (bit.ly/3GelQuF), chief economic advisor V. The most populous by far, this group’s size peaked at 50 million in 2018-19, shrank to 46.3 million in 2019-20 and then again to 41.2 million in covid-stricken 2020-21. Under debate here is how a shrunken count of individuals at the bottom of India’s tax pyramid-with income of under ₹5 lakh-is best interpreted. We also have a portrait of better-off Indians drawn from income tax data placed in Parliament. While the Centre’s response to the crisis did create an invaluable safety net for the poor, doubts still surround whether its labour tracker offers a better view of how people fared than the more focused consumption survey it scrapped in 2019, a decision that snapped our main poverty gauge and prompted charges of data torture. That only one quarter went awry, they contend, squares up well with state rollouts of relief in the form of handouts like free food and rural jobs. In a new paper, former Niti Aayog vice-chairman Arvind Panagariya and Interlink Advisors founder Vishal More have used expenditure data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) to argue that all-India poverty went up in the lockdown quarter (till June 2020), but declined thereafter for four quarters on a trot. Statistical snapshots are no paragons of perfection, but what little data we have does allow low-rez estimations. ![]() But what did the covid shock do to it? The picture remains hazy.
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