ECovid-19 Lockdown: The Economy And The Virus

Life. It's life itself that is affected, profoundly so and almost at a genetic level. And that means at every other extended level of human experience. Emotional and psychological, to begin with, and from there to what we go out about doing with our daily lives. Earning our bread, trying to survive - or thrive.

- Lola Nayar and Jyotika Sood

By March 11, 2020, when the WHO declared COVID-19 as a pandemic, its impact was being felt across the globe, by the 7.8 billion humans living on the planet. With an overwhelming majority of them in no position to help themselves. India has not evolved to a stage where those ratios—of humanity feeling the pain—can be assuaged by the State in any appreciable manner. In an evolving crisis, when no one is able to say for sure when it will be contained and what its long-term impact could be, the stress will be placed unequally on the individual and society, and on the government—which takes the responsibility for anticipating risk and putting in the structural buffers. And the structural risk, which affects everyone, is as economic as it is biological.

India has the recent experience of demonetisation: a sudden, unannounced alteration to our basic economic grammar. Globally, many are drawing parallels with the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Depression in the 1930s. The present IMF chief, Kristalina Georgieva, is only the second woman to be in that position—at a time when the IMF chief economist too is an Indian woman, Gita Gopinath. Which is appropriate because the effects of most economic crises are unequally borne by women. Our “financial systems are more resilient now,” Georgieva said, to assuage anxieties, comparing it to 2008. But, given that no one is sure how long the crisis will last or unfold, even she found it necessary to say: “Under any scenario, the global growth in 2020 will drop below last year’s level. How far it will fall, and for how long, is difficult to predict, and would depend on the epidemic, but also on the timeliness and effectiveness of our actions.”