The living have to live.

"Extreme poverty in India dropped to 10.2% in the pre-Covid year of 2019 from as much as 22.5% in 2011 and the pace of reduction in rural India has been more dramatic than in urban areas, according to a World Bank working paper," FE. "Extreme poverty has been measured in terms of the number of people living on less than $1.90 a day (roughly Rs 145)." A working paper from the IMF "suggested that extreme poverty in India was as low as 0.8% in 2019 and the country managed to keep it at that level in 2020 despite the pandemic, by resorting to food transfers through the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana." Poverty estimates in India are based on private surveys, wrote Prof Himanshu. "Private, because the government, which used to conduct consumption expenditure surveys (CES) and poverty update lines, has abdicated its responsibility." Poverty levels are estimated from the Private Final Consumption Expenditure (PFCE) which is an average of national consumption and "PFCE estimates do not give the distribution of consumption across households which is a prerequisite for estimating poverty." The government has an aversion to accurate figures. "The New York Times, in its article titled 'India is stalling WHO's efforts to make Global Covid Death Toll Public', claimed the WHO estimate will show that India's death toll is at least four million, almost eight times the official number," HT. In 2021, a local Gujarati newspaper, the Sandesh, started counting numbers of deaths from Covid. "On the night of 16 April, the journalists drove 150km (93 miles) around Ahmedabad and visited 21 cremation grounds," BBC. "At the end of the night the team had counted more than 200 bodies. But the next day, Ahmedabad counted only 25 deaths." "On 5 May, the paper counted 83 deaths in Vadodara. The official figure was 13." On 5 May 2021, "Planeloads of ventilators, oxygen supplies and antiviral drugs began arriving last week, with photos showing massive parcels being unloaded at new Delhi airport," CNN. "Medical workers and local officials are still reporting the same devastating shortages that have strained the health care system for weeks now -- raising questions, even among foreign donors, of where the aid is going." Why distribute medical supplies when you deny any problem exists? Instead, "Tax authorities in India raided several offices of one of the world's biggest selling newspapers" CNN. The newspaper, Dainik Bhaskar, "shocked India with its reporting of dead bodies in the river Ganga during the brutal second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic," and "criticized authorities for under-reporting Covid-19 deaths and challenged state officials and the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the handling of the crisis." How are the levels of poverty and Covid deaths linked? Poor people do not care for statistics and depend on government handouts for survival. "Modi has probably learnt from mistakes of his predecessors and has only upped the game with with one massive social welfare scheme after another," Mint. The dead are gone. The living have to survive somehow.