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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | After a brief decline, India's misery index spikes again in 2017 -Pramit Bhattacharya

After a brief decline, India's misery index spikes again in 2017 -Pramit Bhattacharya

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published Published on Mar 1, 2018   modified Modified on Mar 1, 2018
-Livemint.com

Unless economic misery is alleviated soon, the Narendra Modi-led BJP may have to face angry voters in 2019 general elections

New Delhi:
A year back, there seemed to be no stopping Narendra Modi. After a landslide victory in the Uttar Pradesh elections, the Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seemed to have acquired an aura of invincibility. But that aura has diminished somewhat over the past few months as anti-incumbency has grown. The BJP’s narrow victory in the Gujarat elections held in December 2017, and its losses in bypolls held in Rajasthan earlier this month have set off speculation about whether the opposition Congress party could stage a comeback in 2019.

The results of a nationally representative survey conducted earlier this year by the Lokniti research programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in collaboration with ABP News also suggests that Modi’s popularity may be past its peak, with approval ratings for the Modi regime witnessing a decline between May 2017 and January 2018.

What lies behind the growing disenchantment with the Modi regime? The answer may well lie in high levels of economic misery.

The Mint misery index has remained at an elevated level for most of Modi’s tenure. After witnessing a brief decline in the first half of 2017, it spiked once again in the second half.

The Mint misery index is an Indian adaptation of the misery index originally created by the American economist Arthur Okun. Okun added up the unemployment and inflation rates in the US to develop a simple numerical measure of how economic conditions affect citizens. Over the years, the index has been a popular tool to gauge the living conditions under different US presidents.

Unlike in the case of the US, credible and regular data on employment in India is hard to come by. To get around this problem, we use real rural wages (adjusting for inflation) as a proxy for rural employment levels, since wages and labour demand tend to move in tandem. For urban India, even regular wage data is unavailable. Hence, we make use of a somewhat broad indicator—non-food credit growth—which captures the level of economic activity in the period under consideration. An earlier version of the Mint misery index had used growth in gross domestic product (GDP) as a proxy for employment. But given that the new GDP series is not comparable with the past series, we avoid using that indicator.

The revamped Mint misery index is thus a composite indicator based on three key economic parameters—inflation, real rural wage growth, and non-food credit growth. The index has been normalized to take values between 0 and 100, with values closer to 100 denoting greater misery.

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Livemint.com, 27 February, 2018, http://www.livemint.com/Politics/E1n3PkRozpPLaEhO1EKz8J/After-a-brief-decline-Indias-misery-index-spikes-again-in.html
 

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