Until late March, Ashish Kumar was helping to make plastic boxes for Ferrero Rocher praline chocolates and the plastic spoons tucked inside Kinder Joy eggs to scoop out the milky sweet cream inside.
Ashish Kumar, 20, who used to work at a plastics factory in western India, poses outside a primary school where he studied in Dutta Nagar village in Gonda district in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India, July 10, 2020. REUTERS/Pawan Kumar
For years, people in rural India have been gaining prosperity and moving into what economists call a burgeoning middle class of consumers – those who earn more than $10 a day, by some definitions. This group has been a keystone of plans for economic development in the world’s second most populous country. In the COVID-19 pandemic, India’s economy is forecast to shrink by 4.5% this year, according to the International Monetary Fund.
“No matter what,” he said, sitting near his parent’s single-storey home, surrounded by jade green paddy fields. “I need a job.”A chance conversation with a cousin who had studied plastic engineering got him hooked, Kumar said, and he started researching. In Dutta Nagar, where there were no internet connections, that often meant asking one of a handful of locals with a smartphone to Google the opportunities.
Six days a week, his work typically involved overseeing two machines and a couple of contract workers. At the end of the day, he would relax with a game of badminton or watch wrestling on YouTube.
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