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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | 'Pushing Urban Poor to Take Loans is Wrong, Govt Needs to Give Income Support Instead' -Karan Thapar

'Pushing Urban Poor to Take Loans is Wrong, Govt Needs to Give Income Support Instead' -Karan Thapar

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published Published on Jul 7, 2021   modified Modified on Jul 28, 2021

-TheWire.in

Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Jayati Ghosh, says over the last 16 months of the pandemic the government’s handling of the economic crisis has been cruel and incompetent.

One of India’s well-known and highly regarded economists has said the government’s refusal to provide income support to the unemployed and poor and instead asking them to take government guaranteed loans which the Chief Economic Advisor has said they can default upon, is a “a terrible terrible mistake”.

This move, in the government’s recently announced a Rs 6.28 lakh crore package, says Professor Jayati Ghosh, is morally and economically wrong.

In a 35-minute interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire, Professor Ghosh, who is at present Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA and was previously Professor of Economics at JNU, says over the last 16 months of the pandemic the government’s handling of the economic crisis has been cruel and incompetent. “I expected more to help the poor to survive,” she says.

In the interview there’s a long discussion on the strategy to help the unemployed and poor, explained by the Chief Economic Advisor, Krishnamurthy Subramanian, in an op-ed article in the Times of India on June 30, where he argues that rather than create an urban MGNREGA scheme for the urban poor and unemployed it’s better to advise them to accept government guaranteed loans from micro finance institutions which, additionally, he adds, they can readily default upon.

This is what he wrote in the article: “When a loan is given by (an) MFI and fully guaranteed by the government, this scheme serves as a quasi-cash transfer targeted to the genuinely distressed…This category of borrowers will avail the loan and default on it.”

Ghosh says its morally wrong to ask the poor and unemployed to accept loans and then dishonour them. She also says this is completely contrary to the experience of Bangladesh’s famous Grameen Bank and India’s own MFIs who have succeeded because they can rely on the poor to honour their debts. To now tell the poor to dishonour their debts and default is both morally wrong and contrary to the experience of India’s micro finance institutions.

On the other hand, it’s the rich like Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi, and Mehul Choksi who take loans and default.

Please click here to read more. 


TheWire.in, 7 July, 2021, https://thewire.in/economy/watch-karan-thapar-jayati-ghosh-urban-poor-mgnrega-loans


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