Pandemics, COVID-19 and India
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Pandemics, COVID‑19 and India Shreekant Gupta1
© Editorial Office, Indian Economic Review 2020
JEL Classification I18 · I38 · N35 · Q13 · H75 · H6 · E6 The Indian Economic Review is pleased to publish a Special Issue on Pandemics, COVID-19 and India. In doing so, we join the growing ranks of journals with Special Issues on this topic. Two questions inevitably arise in an exercise of this nature. First, given the unpredictable and rapidly changing trajectory of the pandemic, is it possible to conduct a meaningful analysis of it? Second, given the deluge of research on the pandemic what can one hope to add to the literature? The first question is especially pertinent since things have turned out to be much worse than expected. For instance, when this Special Issue was conceivedin early May, lockdown 2.0 had just ended. The country had recorded about 40,000 cases and 1300 deaths. There was little inkling of what lay in store for India in terms of the magnitude of the disease or its devastating impact on the economy or the scale of human suffering. There was hope (unfounded in retrospect) that somehow India would dodge the bullet. That the government had it all worked out. It would tamp down the virus and not let the economy go into a tailspin. Or that the summer heat would kill the virus, or somehow Indians were more immune, and so on. During the time the papers for this Special Issue were commissioned, reviewed and published, there has been an exponential growth in the number of cases and deaths. As this Introduction goes to press, India’s cumulative case count is nearing 9 million and at least 130,000 people have died.1 Promises of a quick, decisive victory over the pandemic have been belied2 and 1 Prima facie, the case fatality rate (CFR) appears strikingly low. But a recent analysis that uses agespecific fatality rates from 17 comparison countries and a decomposition exercise of the CFR, shows that India’s CFR is, if anything, too high rather than too low (Philip et al. 2020). 2 On March 25, Prime Minister Modi had said “(T)he Mahabharata war was won in 18 days, this war the whole country is fighting against coronavirus will take 21 days.” Similarly, on April 24 Niti Aayog member V.K. Paul stated “(T)he curve has begun to flatten. Had we not taken the decision of clamping the nationwide lockdown, we would have had around 1 lakh COVID-19 cases by now, as per a reasonable estimate. Now, the outbreak is under control.” In fact, a slide in a presentation by him on that day showed zero new cases by May 16, 2020.
* Shreekant Gupta [email protected] 1
Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, Delhi, India
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the country is resigned to a long hard slog against it.3 Similarly, the impact on the economy has been far worse than was expected in the early days of the pandemic. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) in successive reports of World Economic Outlook (WEO), has repeatedly downgraded its forecast for India’s GDP growth for 2020—from 1.9% in A
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