Financial Express India can learn a lot from its experience in managing cash – getting a billion people what they need can be planned effectively A vaccine for Covid-19 is expected to come sometime over the next few months – hopefully in this year. Once a vaccine is available, getting it to India’s billion plus people is a logistical challenge with many moral and ethical questions attached. How should India plan for the vaccination program? Before we go there, let us recognize that a few very important questions still remain to be answered. What shape and form the vaccine will be remains to be seen: it is expected that it will be intravenous and hence may require skilled or trained practitioners to administer. It is also not clear whether there will be only one vaccine or many competing ones, and how effective each might be. All of this will feed into the number of doses that might be required – whether a single shot would do or multiple jabs may be required. Hopefully, India will...
Financial Express What the virus spread has revealed is that it is difficult to predict where it might emerge next and with what ferocity What has surprised the world about the new Coronavirus, Covid-19, is how quickly it engulfed the globe and how the unlikeliest of places emerged as hotspots for the epidemic. Starting in a deep interior region of China, it quickly spread across the world and became an epidemic in places that one would not have imagined have a link with the original location. The globalized world of air travel and deep, cross-linked supply chains meant that the virus was able to quickly spread out. It took root in a few places (even as it was quickly contained in Singapore) finding fertile ground in Iran and Italy. The jury is out on whether this can be safely contained in other places where the outbreak is starting to be reported like the USA, Europe, the UK, India, and other countries. What the virus spread has revealed is that it is difficult to predict wher...
Financial Express The new normal after Covid-19 requires a re-imagining of macroeconomics: we need to start defining the contours of, and measuring, the fourth sector. (First of a two-part article) “There are three estates in Parliament but in the Reporters' Gallery yonder there sits a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech or witty saying, it is a literal fact, very momentous to us in these times.” Edmund Burke's quote highlighted the rising of the Fourth Estate as press and media became an important pillar of the society. A similar momentous time is upon us again, courtesy the pandemic, as we recognize what brings income and wealth to the society. In an earlier article , “ Getting India digitally ready: COVID-19 pandemic highlights urgent need to build digital cocoons for the whole population ” (May 15, 2020, The Financial Express), we had looked at the importance of and need to build “digital cocoons” for a large segment of India’s p...
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