Today we as a nation along with rest of the world facing the unprecedented situations in form of the Pandemic caused by the virus known as the Corona Virus or COVID-19, the pandemic not only possess the great challenge towards human life but also on Economic front due to the nationwide lock-down implemented by the government to fight this pandemic.
The immediate priority is to fight this Pandemic; however, we should start planning on how to revamp our economy in the post-lock-down period. We need to understand the short-term and long-term impact of the lock-down on our economy and based on this assessment we can formulate our strategy to revamp our economy.Sorry, this file type is not permitted for security reasons.
We need to identify the problems faced by different industries and then come up with industry-specific solutions. The service sector such as retail, aviation and entertainment are going to face low demand from the customer due to lower footfall to maintain social distancing and overall recession in the economy. The government may take the following steps such as direct infusion of the fund to these industries. The government in consultation with Reserve Bank of India provides for the moratorium to these industries from repayment of any loan amount and interest thereon and deduction in the interest rate charged by the bank and in the corporate tax rate.
The manufacturing sector and MSME are going to face production shut-down, supply chain disruption, increased cost of labor and low consumption. All this will cause serious damage to the viability of the manufacturing sector including MSME.
To answer these problems, we need to understand the root cause of these problems and one reason among others is reverse migration of the workforce. The government needs to devise strategy both in the short-term and long term to answer these problems. In long-term government need to decentralized the industrial pocket so that in future migration can be stopped and havoc created by reverse migration can be stopped.
The government should promote the industry to formulate the plan to protect workers returning to work. Moreover, the government should also reform its own administrative structure so that the plans submitted by private sector industries are addressed quickly.
The other sections of the population that will suffer from this lockdown are the farmers and labourers. Many organizations such as International Monetary Fund and World Bank have already predicted that the world will witness recession much worse than that of 2008-09 causing widespread job-loss. To fight this situation our government should come up with some quick solution to counter this problem. The government may take the following steps such as the implementation of Universal Basic Income Scheme implemented through Direct Transfer of Fund and invest in public infrastructure projects.
It cannot be denied that we are facing the tough time due to this pandemic but by reforming our economy and by taking other required steps we will pass through this testing time and convert this threat into an opportunity.
(Author can be reached at E-mail ID- nishantmishra008@gmail.com/csnishantmishra@yahoo.com)
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