The entire country is doing less to no work, the economy is bleak, to say the least, and the GDP is nowhere near what we achieved this time, last year. Will we be able to overcome this tragedy caused by COVID 19? how long will it take for us to get back to being one of the fastest-growing economies in the world?
Table of Contents
The Most Affected
First and foremost, many people lost their jobs because of this pandemic. People from different sectors and industries. From automobile to construction to small traders. But the people who were affected the most were industries that required direct consumer contact or human contact to be exact.
The people who worked in factories or IT firms had what you’d say ‘a better deal’. Only a part of them was permanently let go. The rest of them were only temporarily put out of work or maybe worked from home. They started working once the lockdown was relaxed.
People employed in services that required direct human contact or industries that could only cater to people in large crowds were hit the most because of the COVID 19 lockdown. Many of them, even after much of the relaxations by the government, is yet to come back to business.
The most ‘visibly’ hit industry is the entertainment industry. Everything from theatres, theme parks, concerts are still not operational. They may have been able to pay their employees for the first month or two of the lockdown. But now, as time goes by, they are incurring a lot of debt in the form of interest. So, it is very unlikely that they are still paying their employees, rather they would have permanently relived them and must be considering complete rehiring when the pandemic ends.
The Statistics
As of writing this article, the total active cases worldwide is 4,120,074 and in India, number of active cases is 203,328. To get more live updates, you can visit worldometer. The number of new cases daily seems to keep on increasing.
However, the unemployment rate in India has actually decreased because of the unlock 1.0 measures. It is at 11.9% as of 27 June, after peaking out at 24.76% on May 9 according to CMIE. finally some good news? Not really. It’s not a coincidence that the number of cases shot up after unlock 1.0 . As more businesses opened up, more people started going out either for work or seeking the products and services offered by these businesses.
The Government
On June 30, unlock 1.0 comes to an end. The government must now decide whether to further relax the lockdown considering the economic relief that unlock 1.0 brought, or to dial back on the relaxations because of the exponential increase in COVID cases that it had brought? Our guess is that the government will proceed with the relaxation. Why? well because at this stage more lockdown can only slow down the spread of the virus but can’t really eradicate the virus completely. The numbers have exceeded that stage. Another lockdown will only disable the economy even more at this stage the government is running out funds to help the unfortunate and the only way to help them would be to give back their jobs. Or else the deaths caused by starvation will get as high as the deaths caused by COVID 19.
Or not… we can’t really predict what Modi Sarkar will do… They have surprised us many a times before this, to be honest.
The Future
Well, things will not be the same for a long time. With thousands and thousands of labourers migrating back to their natives. Cities will struggle to find the necessary workforce. Industries may not be able to meet the demand for some products. Some other products which are high cost will lose their demand because of the mass layoffs and the economic downturn. The automobile sector was not really looking good at the start of this year and we can expect it to get even worse.
The global supply chain that we had built through the years, has now collapsed. It will not be easy to get the supply chain back to normal because different countries would open up at different time frames. It all depends on where they are on the curve. So, it will take a while for some products to get back on stock. Or maybe, many countries (India included) may try to go self-reliant.
Conclusion
The country’s in recession now. But it is a recession caused by the pandemic and the lockdown. Once these get over, we will start to get back on track. With the government’s help, we will slowly but surely get past this tragedy. Until then, we have to work the jobs we get, make the deals we need to make, and hope for the best.
Yes, the ride back may not be pleasant, yes, we are on rough roads here. But remember we’re still moving and That’s all that matters.