In May 2021 the IMF revised its earlier optimistic forecasts, saying the Indian economy was expected to grow 6.9% in 2022, having previously contracted by a record 8%. This translates to real pain and suffering: Pew research institute figures show that in January 2020 about 4.3% of Indians were earning less than $2 a day, but by the beginning of 2021 this had risen to 9.7%, or 134-million people.
Painful scenes of the Indian government’s mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic, with 25-million infections and about 280,000 deaths and rising, have cloaked the prepandemic slowing of the economy and the more recent halting of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) electoral juggernaut.