Date: 13/04/2020

Time: 11.00 A.M.

Speaker: Dr. VK Saraswat

Dr. VK Saraswat said that India has done commendably well during COVID19Pandemic so far. He said the government of India has taken a lot of decisions in order to overcome this problem after consulting with various agencies which brought up good results. He specifically mentioned the role of NITIAayog in this regard.He mentioned how NITIAayogis assisting various companies to use the technology developed by DRDO in the manufacturing of Ventilators and thus filling up the gap in our fight against corona Pandemic. On the positive side he said that due to covid pandemic, our health care system has improved considerably.
He mentioned about suggestions made by NITIAayogand relief actions taken by the government for poorer section.
He discussed about the role of India post covid crises. He said that post covid many companies will shift their base from China to India. To make this happen we must restructure our FDI policies and along with this, we have to make sure that transition, interest rates, land rate, laborer rate and labor laws are convincing for FDI's.
While discussing the role of scientific community in this situation, he mentioned about the need of developing the relationship b/w industry and scientific community that is the industry academia relationship.
Regarding lifting of the lockdown period he said that even if the corona virus problem is solved, there may be trailing effects So in present situation if lockdown is lifted, we have to be very disciplined to avoid the reoccurrence of this pandemic. He also said that post covid, we need to reduce our dependency on china, we have to be prepared for bio disasters, we need to push MSME's, we need to prepare our agricultural sector in such a way so that it can bring its produce from farm to floor and we have to trust our private sector to solve the problem of unemployment.