India Pays $4.8 Billion to Its Poor to Ease Virus Woes
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India distributed about $14 each to more than 350 million people to ease their financial stress amid a nationwide lockdown enforced to prevent the coronavirus from spreading, the government said.
The assistance totaling more than 370 billion rupees ($4.84 billion) was given under a state program named “PM Garib Kalyan,” K.S. Dhatwalia, a spokesman for the administration said in a statement. That’s on top of distribution of food grains to 52.9 million people and cooking gas bottles to 9.8 million families — both free of cost — he said in an email response to a Bloomberg News report on deepening distress in the nation’s villages.
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