COVID-19 and Economic Hardship in South Asia

This chapter discusses how COVID-19 increased health vulnerability and poverty. The literature suggests strong correlation between poverty and income mediated by health factors. High out-of-pocket expenditure, migration, and increasing urbanisation strengthened this further in SA regions. This chapter underscores role of policy intervention, which entails financial investment, continuous monitoring, and innovative and inclusive policy design. Prompt policy actions and numerous tailored schemes, in this direction in SA region, helped to contain the spread of COVID-19 in the early stage of infection. India, in particular, has taken a prominent role in these initiatives. This chapter lists governments’ prompt actions in the SA region to mitigate, which took varied forms ranging from lockdown measures to rolling out tailored insurance schemes. It highlights that the pre-COVID standards of living were already alarming enough to necessitate urgent policy interventions aimed at addressing the underlying issues. Thus, many countries in the region had already designed suitable schemes pre-COVID, but rolled it out in massive scale as soon as COVID hit the countries, e.g. India launched Ayushman Bharat in 2018—world’s largest health insurance scheme.

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