India’s giant outsourcing firms are facing a two-front challenge: protecting the health of millions of employees as the nation suffers the world’s worst Covid-19 crisis, and ensuring that their work continues as usual for the big Western companies on their client lists. Read Here | The Wall Street Journal
All pandemic long, scientists brawled over how the virus spreads. Droplets! No, aerosols! At the heart of the fight was a teensy error with huge consequences. Read Here | Wired
China contends that it is selflessly coming to the aid of the pandemic-stricken developing world by exporting nearly as much Covid-19 vaccine as it uses domestically. Along these lines, President Xi Jinping has branded Chinese-made vaccines as a “global public good.” Read Here | Asia Times
The tragedy is not India’s alone. Such outbreaks are breeding grounds for more dangerous and potentially vaccine-resistant variants of the virus. All countries must recognize that they are in a race against time to vaccinate humanity. Read Here | Foreign Affairs
The pandemic is likely to stay for longer. The first round impact will be on overall economic growth. The second round fallout, the one which is more worrisome, will see deepening of the structural fault lines that have already set in; growing income inequality, deepening digital divide, joblessness and further erosion of the country’s already […]
The global economy is entering unfamiliar territory. After a decade of worries about inadequate demand and spending power in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, signs of insufficient supply are now emerging. Read Here | The Economist
Unfortunately, Modi failed to recalibrate India’s dynamics when the economic sun was shining. An environment sparking comparisons to Dante or, at the very best, Charles Dickens is not promising for getting reforms done. Or for where India’s economy might find itself 10 years from now. Read Here | Asia Times
Despite COVID-19, remittance flows remained resilient in 2020, registering a smaller decline than previously projected. Officially recorded remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries reached $540 billion in 2020, just 1.6 percent below the 2019 total of $548 billion. Read Here | World Bank
The international community must join forces and develop a collective approach to help India address its COVID-19 crisis, not only for moral reasons, but also because the health of other countries’ populations and economies are at stake. Governments can take several steps to mitigate the impact.
India’s hospitals were packed with coronavirus patients, relatives of the sick scrambled to find supplies of oxygen, and crematoriums were running near full capacity to handle the dead. Yet despite those clear signs of an overwhelming health crisis, Prime Minister Narendra Modi pressed ahead with a densely packed campaign rally. Read Here | APNews
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