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Authors
Marianne Bertrand, Chris P. Dialynas Distinguished Service Professor of Economics,University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Faculty Director, Chicago Booth's Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation and UChicago’s Poverty Lab;Kaushik Krishnan, Chief Economist, Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE); and Heather Schofield, Assistant Professor, Perelman School of Medicine and The Wharton Schoolat the University of Pennsylvania. Emails: marianne.bertrand@chicagobooth.edu; kkrishnan@cmie.com; hschof@wharton.upenn.edu
Acknowledgements
We thank Shreya Agarwal, Gabriel Jardanovski, Devika Lakhote, and Feng Lin for excellent research assistance.
[1]Exceptions were granted to select government ministries and departments, commercial establishments such as ration shops (under Public Distribution System), essential telecommunication services and banks, units engaged in manufacturing and transportation of essential commodities, and other emergency services.
[2]CPHS is conducted across the country, except in Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep, Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu. Some parts of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh are no longer surveyed due to concerns for CMIE staff safety. Ladakh is also not surveyed as it is not accessible year-round.
[3]The responses from this short-term survey will be available to subscribers of the CPHS data delivery service, CPdx.
[4]Potential answers to this question were“Yes”or“No”.
[5]Potential answers to this question were “0 day”, “1 day”, “2 days,”3 days”, “4 days”, “5 days”, “6 days”, “1 week”, “2weeks”, “3 weeks”, “1 month”, “2 months”, “3 months or more”.
[6] Pre-lockdown income is measured by a household’s total income in February, 2020. Per-capita income is computed as total household income / sqrt(household size). The computed quintiles correspond to Rs.0–Rs.3,801, Rs.3,801¬–Rs.5,914, Rs.5,914–Rs.8,142, Rs.8,142–Rs.12,374 and Rs.12,374–Rs.101,902 respectively. Care should be taken in attaching labels to these groups. For example, though the quintile ranging from Rs.5,914–Rs.8,142 is the middle quintile, it may be misleading to describe these households as middle-income or middle-class. Similarly the highest quintile starts at Rs.12,374 per-capita per-month, which again does map well to commonly held notions of what the “richest” households in India might be.
[7] Figures 4 and 9are made using shapefiles for India from Community Created Maps of India by Data{meet}. These shape files depictISO countries and not sovereign states. We do not claim these to be maps that accurately depict India’s sovereign or internal political borders. Any queries or issues regarding these shape files should be directed to Data{meet}.
[8] Other than the regions that are not usually surveyed in CPHS(seenote 1 above), we have dropped states with less than 50 observations from our analysis when producing state-level statistics. While CPHS is representative at the state level, the operational constraints of surveying under a lockdown meant that some states were not adequately covered in the 13-day window for which the two survey questions ran. The states dropped areJammu and Kashmir(2),Goa(33)andSikkim (36)where the numbers in parentheses are the sample sizes for those states.
[9]CMIE is currently running a longer-run survey developed in partnership with Dvara Research Foundation and with inputs from the World Bank to measure the extent to which households are able to make use of state welfare benefits and analysis of this data will begin soon.
[10]Median household per-capita monthly income is Rs. 6,928.



