Post Covid-19 Advantage India

Between military wars and biologic wars, the latter is more damaging and unpredictable as the impact made by COVID-19 on the global economy was far from anybody’s initial expectation. No one can correctly predict the extent to which the global economies would be impacted by COVID-19. This scale of lockdown has happened first time in the human’s known history where every economic activity is closed except production and transportation of essential goods and services. This is unprecedented. The United Nations has termed this crisis as the worst we have seen since World War II. But there is a saying that every crisis also brings opportunities and necessitates creative solutions; or the progress comes from dire situations. It was once said that never let a crisis goes to waste. This is what India should be looking at.

- CMA B. B. Goyal

During last 100 years, world has seen two global wars, first from 1914 to 1918 and second from 1939 to 1945. Now the entire world is fighting third war imposed by China led COVID-19. It began in December 2019 but no one knows its end. More than two & half million people are already affected and every ten seconds one is dying. During last hundred years, world has also faced number of economic depressions, financial crises, and pandemic/ epidemic attacks. But COVID-19 pandemic is the only war that has no military or economic solutions. While this pandemic is causing tragic loss of life, the lockdowns has affected billions of people across continents. It has hit like a worldwide hurricane, shutting activity in most economies simultaneously. As per IMF, it is set to rob the global economy of more than USD 5 trillion of growth over the next two years. The World Trade Organization announced that the pandemic could cause a deeper collapse of international trade flows. Geopolitics would further worsen the situation as the mistrust between Washington (& major European nation) and Beijing has gone up because of the blame game around the pandemic.

Back home, for India, the economic costs of the present lockdown are going to be disproportionately high. An estimate made by British Brokerage Barclays, extension of nationwide lockdown till May 3 will inflict an economic loss of USD 234.4 billion, and may result in stagnant GDP for the calendar year 2020. But a looming economic crises triggered by the coronavirus pandemic is a chance for India to enact sweeping reforms to fixing ailing sectors and attract more foreign investment in the country. India has to focus on growth capital.

Reliability crises for China