Kickstarting the Indian Economy via vaccination
Ideas and lines of thinking to liberate the Indian Economy from the economic shackles due to Covid 19 by improving the vaccination rate.
First and foremost, the main aim of the Modi administration should be to tackle Coronavirus by vaccination and other measures. Talking about vaccination, the Indian central government has failed miserably in this aspect. Even with the production capacity of 60 million vaccines monthly from the Serum Institute’s production facility, India has only managed to vaccinate 27 million of its 1300 million population as of 11th April 2021.
India’s current speed of vaccination is ~2–3 million per day, which is dismal and to achieve herd immunity, which is two-thirds of the population by October of this month, India will need to achieve a vaccination rate of at least 8 million jabs per day. And we are far from it.
In addition to vaccination, strict adherence and following of safety protocols and social distancing is required. But we Indians, have never been good at following such advice even when we know that it is for our self-benefit; case in point of maintaining cleanliness around us.
These measures are the bare minimum, we collectively as a nation have to ensure.
The Indian central government has tied the hands of the Serum Institute of India by limiting the supply of its production only via the central government. Praveen explains the process in detail in this piece published in The Ken. Government should open up the restriction by inviting the private players or organizations who have the means to ensure complete vaccination at a smaller scale and with limited demographics. Inviting top 200 companies by market cap is a good suggestion and they already have the supply chain/operations systems in place or they have the means to establish the same in a short time. HDFC bank has ~2 lakh employees, SBI has ~2.5 lakh employees. Indian Railways has ~13 lakh employees. On average, considering 2.5 dependents per employee, this move will give India a small boost on the vaccination front.
Overall, allowing SII to form agreements independently with private players (even the state government) will change the game completely; however, it will also bring in the question of inaccessibility of vaccines by poor people.
Another is to open up vaccination for everyone above the age of 19 years of age because they are most susceptible to being the super spreaders. And the more time period there is between the vaccinated and those non-vaccinated will endanger the whole process by rendering it useless due to these super spreaders.
Staying true to the promises of the Annual Budget
GoI should work on the lines to stay true to its commitment given in the Annual Budget by expending as promised in the Q1 of the FY 2021–22, establishing the bad bank, meeting the privatization and disinvestments targets especially Air India, spending on Infrastructure via DFI.
Additionally, reducing corruption, increasing the ambit of the income tax and income tax filing to bring the majority of non-salaried earners of the economy under the white income bracket. The difference is very visible among tax returns of an average salaried employee and non-salaried employee.
