Nirmala Sitharaman's Rescue Act

The government’s efforts to jumpstart the economy with stimuli may give short-term results, but it is just the beginning of the long road to recovery

- K. Sunil Thomas, Nachiket Kelkar And Vijaya Pushkarna

The sun sears down as Vijay Singh surveys the bleak horizon. The past few days have been hot, a sharp contrast to the rains that inundated his farmland in Aneegarhi in western Uttar Pradesh just a week ago. The inconsistency of the weather, however, is just one of his many worries. “Things are just getting increasingly troublesome,” said Singh, who took up farming potatoes and wheat ten years ago. “The output is bad if the weather plays truant, and when the output is good, the market prices fall.”

And it is not just him. “The whole village is in trouble,” he said. “Some are selling their land to pay off their debts.” Singh, 35, is now planning to give up farming and move to a city to make a living, perhaps to Delhi NCR for an office job.

Jageshwar Sharma may not advise that, though. Son of a farmer from a village near Kanpur, Sharma, 22, moved a year ago to take up an assembly-line job through a contractor at a Samsung plant in Greater Noida. At the first whiff of a sales decline this summer, he lost his job. “A thousand of us were fired,” he said. “Being young and educated, I managed to find another job after a few months. But it has been tough for many others to get back on their feet.”

Cut across to Mumbai, you may think investment adviser Aarti Malhotra Chawla’s life is a world apart, but you will be surprised. “The chips are down, with unreasonable regulations and pressure from the government,” she said. “The wealth industry is taking home less and less each year. People are losing their jobs. They have loans to pay, children to bring up. There is a lot of pain on the street.”

HOW BAD IS IT?