A difficult choice between now and the future.

"In Sitapur (in Uttar Pradesh), the daily wage currently hovers between Rs 200 and Rs 250 per day, not very different from nominal wages five years back. Even then, most have to scrounge to find work for 15 days in a month," wrote Sayantan Bera. "Rural demand has collapsed due to a prolonged period of declining real wages and a hit to farm incomes from rising input prices of fertilizer and diesel, said Himanshu, associate professor at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. The rising prices of food items when wages are falling and casual work is hard to find is also impacting the nutrition status of poor households." "Real income is how much money an individual or entity makes after accounting for inflation and is sometimes called real wage when referring to an individual's income," Investopedia. Adjusting income against inflation provides the real purchasing power of an individual. "The gap between work demanded and work provided under the rural employment guarantee scheme widened to an all-time high in November with only 11.66 crore (116.6 million) persondays work generated as on November 30, 2021 against 22.23 persondays in October even as the demand for work was higher in November than in October. Year-on-year, the personday work generated under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) fell by 50.5% against 23.58 crore in November 220," ET. The objective of the MGNREGS Act was "to provide at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work", Government of India. The scheme is supposed to be demand-driven and provides a legal guarantee for wage employment. "People in India are in 'extreme pain' and the economy is still below the 2019 levels, with 'small aspirations' of people becoming even smaller now, Nobel laureate economist Abhijit Banerjee has said," ET. "The death of a breadwinner is one of the most serious emergencies that poor households have to face," wrote Prof Jean Dreze and Jasmin Naur Hafiz. "The National Family Benefit Scheme (NFBS), launched in 1995 under the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP), is meant to help the survivors in these circumstances." But the budget for NFBS has been cut from Rs 8.62 billion in 2014-15 to just Rs 4.81 billion in 2020-21. "In effect, the scheme is being quietly phased out." "Over 33 lakh (3.3million) children in India are malnourished and more than half of them fall in the severely malnourished category with Maharashtra, Bihar and Gujarat topping the list, the WCD ministry has said in response to a RTI query," TOI. "Again, in a relatively poor country like India -- our per capita income is roughly one-fifth of China and one-thirtieth of US -- the income or consumption levels chosen as the cut-off point for poverty (also called the poverty line) are often quite similar to 'starvation' levels (or lines)," wrote Udit Misra. Even as budgets for MGNREGS and NFBS are being cut, "Public sector banks have lost nearly Rs 2.85 lakh crore (Rs 2.85 trillion) on account of loan dues of 13 corporates," FE. Spend on subsidies or on supporting companies to create jobs - an impossible choice.