During the year that will end on 31 March 2021, India’s economy will contract by 9 percent, said ratings agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P), not the 5 percent the agency had predicted earlier.
The pandemic and shutdown will rob India’s GDP of 13 percent of its potential growth over the next three years, S&P added.
Moody’s and Goldman Sachs both forecast a double-digit crash this year for what had been the world’s fastest growing large economy.
India shut down on 24 March with only a few hours’ notice. Hundreds of millions of people of all classes were suddenly out of work.
TRENDPOST: To date, India, a nation of 1.3 billion people, has reported some 90,000 COVID-19 deaths, compared to the United States, with a population of 330 million that has registered 205,000 virus victims.
It should be noted that as India’s government takes strong lockdown measures to save its people from the virus, according to a 2019 study by the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution (GAHP), about 2.3 million people died of air pollution related deaths.
Yet, this does not make the news, only the coronavirus does, and absent is the fact that those who died of the virus represent just 0.00692 percent of India’s population.
Yet, this does not make the news, only the coronavirus does.
TREND FORECAST: As Gerald Celente says, “When all else fails, they take you to war.”
To recap what we have been forecasting, India’s economy has long been in decline. As we have reported in the Trends Journal, in 2019, auto sales plunged and over one million workers in the auto industry were laid off. And, again, prior to the COVID War, India’s GDP had declined for seven straight quarters.
According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, India’s unemployment skyrocketed to more than 25 percent due to the lockdown.
Also, as a result of the lockdown, according to IHS Markit’s Purchasing Managers Index, India’s services sector collapsed from 49.3 in March to 5.4 in April. (Any number under 50 signals decline.)
Considering the scale of the global lockdown and the slow phased reopening of businesses with a vast array of restrictions, we forecast India’s economy and its currency will continue to decline, sinking into depression.
As a result, civil unrest, which had been tamped down with the lockdown, will again escalate.
