Around 90% of self-employed Bengaluru residents and 61% of the salaried segment suffered a loss of income due to COVID-19, a consumer insights report by Paisabazaar.com revealed. Among the top metros, Hyderabad saw about 63% of residents suffering a loss if income, while Chennai was least affected.
Over 8500 consumers of Paisabazaar.com between the age of 24 to 57 years from 35+ cities with a debt of Rs 1 lakh or more took part in this survey – ‘Dealing with Debt: How India plans to pay EMIs’.
According to this survey, over 86% of the self-employed customers reported a loss in income due to COVID-led restrictions, while more than a fourth of self-employed customers said their income had come to nil due to the pandemic and the lockdown.
Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru were the most impacted cities in terms of loss of income and loan repayment capacity due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to the report.
The survey showed that Bengaluru was the second most impacted city among the top 6 metros, with 67% respondents suffering a loss of income, followed by Hyderabad (63%), Mumbai (61%), while Chennai was the least affected (52%).
In terms of customers who had a complete loss of income, Mumbai was the worst placed with 26% of the respondents from the city reporting income plummeting to nil. This was followed by Hyderabad, with 20% respondents saying they completely lost their income, followed by Delhi NCR (16%), Bengaluru (12%) and Chennai (9%).
Also, Mumbai had the highest percentage of moratorium takers, as 65% of customers from Mumbai who participated in the survey took a moratorium.
In Bengaluru, a large section of the customers who had taken the moratorium were those whose income was not impacted and had the repayment capacity.
Of the salaried customers who took the moratorium, over one-third (38%) of them did not suffer any impact on their salaries.
“While there was widespread impact on consumers in the first 2-3 of months of the pandemic, we believe there has been steady recovery since July. With the economy beginning to get back to its feet, incomes of customer segments employed in deeply impacted industries like Travel, Aviation, Entertainment, Hospitality etc. should start getting restored gradually. Large lenders including Banks should also grow in confidence in willing to lend to these segments. However, supply of loans to self-employed and low-income segments would take longer to recover,” said Naveen Kukreja, CEO & Co-founder, Paisabazaar.com said in a statement.