“On one hand, a porous lockdown makes sure that the virus will still exist and as you said, it is still waiting to hit you when you will unlock. So you have not solved that problem. But you have definitely decimated the economy. You flattened the wrong curve. It is not the infection curve, it is the GDP curve.”
– Rajeev Bajaj, CEO of Bajaj Auto Ltd, in a conversation with Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi (June 4)
“Migrants from the villages might get better wages in the city, but their living and health conditions, particularly of women and children are abysmal. Can we do something about all this? Plenty… We need to trash the superstitions and shibboleths of 30 years of market theology. And build the kind of state the Constitution of India mandates, where there is, for all citizens, “Justice, social, economic and political”.”
– P. Sainath, founder-editor of People’s Archive for Rural India, on the ‘Migrant mess and the moral economy of the elite’ (India Today, June 8)
“To increase capacity to meet the needs of our population, we need to inaugurate one new university a day, every single day, for the next 20 years – such is the insurmountable scale of the problem.”
– Kapil Viswanathan & Vijay Govindrajan, in ‘Three pathways for us to achieve the Indian dream’ (Mint, June 18)
“A deadly combination of social distancing mandates, area-wise lockdowns and high stress due to job losses are recipe for a coming disaster… post Covid-19 suicide epidemic.”
– Stephen David, well-known journalist, on how social isolation is a silent killer (Deccan Herald, June 20)
“States should be wary of school shutdowns. Not only do they have little effect, but they lead to massive future costs in lost learning and lower long-term productivity and income. A World Bank study estimates that the global lost income from school closures could amount to a global loss of $13 trillion.”
– Bibek Debroy, chairman PM’s Economic Advisory Council & Bjorn Lomborg, president, Copenhagen Consensus (Times of India, June 23
