How seven Indians are tackling soaring prices

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Editor's note: One morning earlier this month, I ran into Savita Kumari, a security guard at a gated community in Greater Noida who works a 12-hour shift.  A single mother of four-year-old twins—a girl and a boy—Kumari lives with her mother in Ghaziabad, not far from Delhi. At 30, she is the sole earner. With a bachelor’s degree in English, she worked at several call centres before she got married in 2015. Four years later, she separated from her alcoholic husband, after which she was hired as a housekeeping supervisor at New Delhi’s Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station, a job that paid Rs 18,000 a month.  In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kumari lost her job. Four months later, she found the security guard’s job. Now she has a new worry: stubbornly high inflation. “Most of my monthly income goes into buying food items at the beginning of the month. Once that is done, I pay the rent and my children’s school fees,” Kumari says in Hindi. Her children’s school fees, she points out, have more than doubled since last year, …