New Delhi, Feb. 6 -- That the Indian economy is going through a difficult phase is no longer a matter of speculation. The Economic Survey not only made that clear, but went further by offering evidence of a decline in earnings of the self-employed in the last six years. For regular and casual workers, wages have been declining for almost a decade, leaving little doubt whether India's slowdown is cyclical or structural.

This isn't the first such episode for this government; its first term saw sharper declines in India's GDP growth rate between 2016-17 and 2019-20, even before the pandemic hit.

Back then, the distress was driven by rural pain. Two years of back-to-back drought followed by demonetization and the GST rollout hurt an already...