Rs 8 trillion stimulus by PM Modi can fully revive economy

New Delhi: Today the lockdown continues in a modified form. The question is: what from now on? No one in the world today can say that the coronavirus, which has been gripping the globe, has been controlled, much less conquered. But we cannot give up that goal. In the meantime, immediate action is called for limitation of the continuing damage and restoration of normalcy.

The Narendra Modi government—that is both the Prime Minister and the Health Minister in particular—deserves praise for taking head-on Covid-19, which is a new and more deadly version of the generic coronavirus; and the government has managed to decelerate the earlier rapidly galloping spread of the virus.

While the United States is reporting 67,000 dead as of May 1, India, with more than four times the population, is reporting 1,075 dead. Of course this vast difference in deaths between a nation far away from China, the source from where the virus originated, and another which is a neighbour of China, will have to be researched by scholars of infectious diseases to determine how much it is due to native immunity of Indians and how much is due to government action.

At present, of the 739 districts in India, about 300 districts are unaffected by coronavirus. Another 300 districts are reporting only a few cases. In the last seven days, no fresh cases have been reported in 80 districts. However, in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Andhra, and Telengana, 90% of the districts have reported cases. Kerala has cases in every district. So do Delhi, Chandigarh, Goa and Ladakh.

Hence, unlike Europe and North America, India is not ravaged nation-wide. Moreover, even though last year, coronavirus research was done clandestinely in Nagaland by a team of Wuhan University, US Department of Defense, and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Nagaland has reported zero cases so far.

In other words, we can now onwards progressively lift the lockdown in 600 of the 739 districts, provided we have an economic stimulus package ready for these districts and the stakeholders in the economy there.

That is why I have suggested in my earlier columns in The Sunday Guardian, that the lockdown should be lifted in a de-centralized way since we have to design the economic package, according to local conditions of infrastructure, raw materials, and availability of skilled labour.

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