Both recognised the best road to recovery from the Covid crisis was infrastructure investment, which is a multiplier, stimulating the private sector to invest, creating jobs, boosting consumption. Joe Biden, the US president, followed suit with a similar strategy in his stimulus package. Before Covid 2 struck, the FM had proposed an inspiring Union Budget that focussed on job-creating growth via infrastructure spending. If BJP wants to redeem some of its lost shine before 2024, it must focus on reforming some of our shoddiest institutions. But the citizen’s day-to-day misery, coping with rotten institutions, will remain. BJP promised in 2014 to change all this via ‘maximum governance, minimum government’. The raging second wave of the virus revealed not only the governmental ineptitude but also exposed India’s soft underbelly – our heavy bureaucratic system, which wasn’t nimble enough to cope with the crisis.Įven more damning was the reminder of how this system fails us daily to deliver basic public goods – justice, health, education, water, electricity etc – which is why India is sometimes called a ‘flailing state’. The events of the past month have been so tragic, so unspeakably ugly that the only rational response was to pretend it wasn’t happening.
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