S.Bhattacharjee:
The prime minister Narendra Modi had given a clarion call to make up India. It’s fine. But in last 66 days of lockdown and Amphan we noticed that there are several loopholes in the governnance system that emerged as the crisis surfaced up.
There are several loopholes to mention but to start with we will take the largest problem that the state and other part of the country suffer after a devastating cyclone or rain. The problem of loosing home. The question syarts from here. We have lot of reasearch institutions in the country. But none of them is coming forward with an idea how to help these people whose houses vanishes after every natural calamity. If these is research the benefit is not trickling in to the decision makers and to ground level and knowledge is not imparted. Now this can happen due to several reasons. Such as the systemis not there at all, there is greed in system to pocket a portion of the multicrore relief benefit that comes immediately after such devastation. The role og good governance to cut off the greed from the system . Now if we have a researched system to develop a house that can withstand extreme calamities, a good system to deliver the knowledge through panchayats while making we can save multicrore from releif budgets.
Likewise all crises are also opportunities for radical reform, for re-aligning priorities, and for tweaking policies in pursuit of the greater common good. History can serve, in the words of Pulitzer Prize winning writer David McCullough, as “a guide to navigation in perilous times”. We might, in these trying times, take inspiration from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’, a series of reforms enacted between 1933 and 1939 that lifted the United States out of the Great Depression and restored hope to the American people. It focused on the ‘three Rs’ of relief for the vulnerable, recovery of the economy, and reform of the financial system– useful Mantras to keep in mind, as India seeks to re-invigorate its economy.
The pandemic has exposed fault lines in the global trade and financial architecture, disrupting our travel patterns, global manufacturing value-chains, and governance systems. The crisis brings home some potent lessons: individual health outcomes cannot be divorced from the health and hygiene systems of the community, that national borders are no defense against threats from nature, and that collective global action is increasingly a sine-qua-non for our own individual protection from such events. The hope remains that the COVID-19 crisis brings about a global epiphany regarding the need for saner responses to the other formidable (and less immediately visible) threat: the effects of climate change. Once this episode is behind us, if its only legacy is to bequeath us a wiser and more deliberative approach to balancing the often-conflicting objectives of economic progress and environment protection, then much good would have come of it.
Two perfect storms: the pandemic and geopolitical disruptions
We also need to think beyond measures to mitigate the impact of the crisis, and around opportunities that may arise for India from global disruptions. Much of India’s economic reform of the early nineties was forced on us on the back of a public-finance crisis, and we also need to think beyond crisis management now, about how we can further refine our economic policies and modernise our infrastructure, particularly around logistics, for fostering more inward investment. The convergence of two perfect storms-the pandemic and the geopolitics-driven disruptions recently seen in global trade and investment flows, may be India’s opportunity to become one of the key nodes of the global value chain. We need to set up two national missions, with the same zeal and focus that went into improving India’s ease-of-doing business rankings; one around reducing process friction for inward investment, and another for improving the ease of undertaking trans-national trade.
We all tend to put our differences aside and come together when faced with an external challenge, and that is presumably the most important element for emerging stronger and better, a pan-national coming together around common goals: alleviating distress, protecting the population, and creating better futures for every Indian.
