What started it?
Although minor occurrences triggered the Wall Street crash, more fundamental factors like a decline in aggregate demand, misplaced monetary policies, and an unintended rise in inventory levels were to the extent of the decline. Impacts: gold Price and real output both fell dramatically in the United States.
The wholesale price index went down by 33%, industrial production went down by 47%, and real GDP went down by 30%. The gold standard, which fixed exchange rates between most of the world's currencies, was primarily responsible for the spread of the chaos in the United States to other nations. Deflation, massive job losses, and a significant drop in output were all felt in almost every nation. Between 1929 and 1933, unemployment in the United States increased from 3.2 percent to 24.9%.
Between the years 1929 and 1932, it increased from 7.2% to 15.4% in the United Kingdom. Numerous political upheavals and extreme human suffering occurred throughout the world during the Great Depression. It is believed that the Depression-induced economic stagnation in Europe was the primary factor in the rise of fascism and the subsequent Second World War. Global institutions and policymaking were profoundly affected, and the gold standard was abandoned as a result.
How was India affected by the Great Depression?
The mainstay of India's economy, agricultural prices, fell dramatically as a result of the global crisis, and colonial policymakers refused to devalue the rupee, which led to a severe credit contraction. Members of the National Congress were the ones who articulated the peasantry's outrage at the decline in agricultural prices, which was exacerbated by British financial policy in India. Around harvest time in 1930, the effects of the Depression became apparent, shortly after Mahatma Gandhi's Civil Disobedience movement was started in April of that year.
In many parts of the country, there were "No Rent" campaigns, and radical Kisan Sabhas were started in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh. The Congress, whose reach had not yet reached rural India, received a flood of support from agrarian unrest. The party's landslide victory in the 1936-37 provincial elections held under the Government of India Act, 1935—which significantly increased the party's political power for years to come—is thought to have been facilitated by the endorsement of the farming classes.
