Covid-19 Pandemic and the Future of SDGs
Covid-19 has been the century’s most unprecedented biological disaster yet the response of Indian as well as most other governments around the world to this pandemic has been pavlovian and blind as if, they were caught unawares. Most governments suffered
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‘Disaster Preparedness’ Could Reduce ‘Economic Losses’ The pandemic control policies of lockdowns, social distancing, containment zones and travel curbs have devastated global economy. Its associated uncertainty and faint possibility of bouncing back in any near future acts as a further depressant to any entrepreneurial initiatives in societies. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects global growth in 2020 is projected to fall to −3% which makes the current ‘Great Lockdown’ the worst recession since the Great Depression of 1930. The pandemic is expected to peak in the second quarter of 2020 and then gradually weaken in the second half of this year, yet the level of economic activity will continue to remain much lower than the pre-pandemic period and a cumulative loss to global GDP by 2021 is expected to be around 9 trillion dollars which is greater than the economies of Japan and Germany combined.1 All economic activity has declined, markets are sluggish and labour has no interest in returning to cities where they see an uncertain
A. Singh (B) Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India © The Author(s) 2020 V. K. Malhotra et al. (eds.), Disaster Management for 2030 Agenda of the SDG, Disaster Research and Management Series on the Global South, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4324-1_18
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future as Covid-19 continues to drag into coming months also. The IMF has been supporting through its emergency funding as many as 60 plus countries which have suffered irretrievable damage to their economics due to COVID-19. The Emergency Funding includes access to around a total demand of USD 100 billion through its Rapid Credit Facility (RCF) and Rapid Financing Instrument (RFI). Bangladesh, Nepal and Maldives have already received financial support under this IMF facility. In India, after a forty days of very strict lockdown when the unlocking began, the economy had no ability to open up as its manpower, transports, supplies and networks were all broken up. In the last fortnight of the lockdown in May, unemployment rate shot up from a pre-lockdown of 6.74 to 24% and that had already pushed 40 crore people into abject poverty (CMIE, 19 May, 08:45 a.m.).2 This unemployment rate being much higher in cities had reached 27% and 23% in urban and rural areas, respectively by mid-May. There does not seem to be any prospective possibility of bouncing back since a sudden decline of 90 lac labour force in key developmental projects have yet to recover from an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Most service centres, call centres and banking operations lacked adequate manpower capacity to restart their work normally (labour participation rate from above 42% in late February to less than 39% as lockdown progressed through April and May. It came down to 34% in cities and 41% in villages). The lockdown economic collapse has affected women, children and the education sector in a big way. New disparities, disabilities and dependence are rising and may further slowdown th
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