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Jobless After Virus Lockdown, India's Poor Struggle to Eat

Associated Press

   NEW DELHI - Some of India's legions of poor and people suddenly thrown
   out of work by a nationwide stay-at-home order began receiving aid
   distribution Thursday, as both the public and private sector work to
   blunt the impact of efforts to curb the coronavirus pandemic.

   India's Finance Ministry announced a 1.7 trillion ($22 billion)
   economic stimulus package that will include delivering monthly grains
   and lentil rations to an astonishing 800 million people, some 60% of
   people in the world's second-most populous country.

   In the meantime, the police in one state were giving rations of rice to
   shanty-dwellers, while another state's government deposited cash into
   the bank accounts of newly unemployed workers. Aid groups, meanwhile,
   worked to greatly expand the number of meals they can hand out.

   The unprecedented order keeping India's 1.3 billion people at home for
   all but essential trips to places like supermarkets or pharmacies is
   meant to keep virus cases from surging above the 553 already recorded
   and overwhelming an already strained health care system.

   Yet the measures that went into effect Wednesday -- the largest of
   their kind in the world -- risk heaping further hardship on the quarter
   of the population who live below the poverty line and the 1.8 million
   who are homeless.

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