Those Above Poverty Line: Development and Vulnerability to the Pandemic

Abstract

OVID-19 pandemic has posed severe challenges to human security with unprecedented vulnerabilities to food, health and income insecurities. In India, as elsewhere, interventions to redress these insecurities have focused on the most vulnerable, those who are extremely poor and fall below the poverty line. This chapter looks at a section of people who are not the extreme poor but nevertheless experience food, health and income insecurity. This group lies just above the poverty line, are excluded from usual welfare targeting and benefits provided by the state, and, represents the gains of development interventions over the past two to three decades. The pandemic has adversely impacted the livelihoods of this group and sent them into a downward spiral of decline into poverty with economic and psychological consequences. The trauma of decline impacts the psychological resilience of these individuals. From a policy perspective, arresting such decline into poverty requires a dynamic and emergent classification of population to target relief interventions at these groups as they are invisible in routine and static categories of welfare targeting.