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We are moving towards zero percent growth as the credit rating agency Moody’s investors service has predicted for the financial year of 2021-2022. It said that the negative context prevailing in the country has its own effect on the GDP growth.

Just a day after the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi announced a Rs 20 lakh crore special economic package, the question on utility and future role of PM Cares Fund surfaced in the public domain in a significant manner.

India is opening up slowly, with a great sense of fear and insecurity, despair and uncertainty. The package worth Rs 20 lakh crore is empty. The things we needed most are not in the package. Even the real worth of the present package is only about Rs 13 lakh crore. To show its worth bigger we have simply added the worth of earlier packages which already had failed our people, our economy. Three phases of lockdown will end to make room for the fourth phase on May 18, 2020. The emerging New India looks different. Everybody is trying to grasp its essence, but no one will have it exactly as it is. Its fluid. Its undergoing a rapid change.

On one level, the coronavirus pandemic holds out the potential to shift America’s dominant cultural mentality to finally rethink—indeed come to terms with—how our political, economic, and moral systems value the work on which our lives most depend.

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the existence of the Other India, which has always been in existence, but remained invisible all along. The Other India comprises millions of migrant labour who do not belong to either the cities or the villages from where they had long been uprooted from. They don’t appear on the radars of politicians, policy planners and the bureaucracy, all of who are mostly obsessed with themselves and their classes of people.

Secretary of State Pompeo loudly condemns Iranian border guards who abused Afghans crossing into Iran. He castigates China’s supposed failings with the COVID 19 pandemic. He and President Trump rail against dictatorship they see in Venezuela. They protest Cuba’s “slave doctors” – who actually “defend health care as a human right,” according to Cuba’s foreign minister. U.S. higher-ups are silent on other matters.

May 12 is celebrated as International Nurses Day as it marks the birth of the founder of modern nursing Florence Nightingale and the formal recognition of nursing in public health and. In addition, the United Nations World Health Assembly resolved to celebrate nurses and midwives by declaring 2020 as the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife (IYNM). In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, this year more than ever, International Nurses Day should be celebrated, and nurses recognised not as “unsung heroes”, but as professionals who deserve the respect of all society and are worthy of decent wages and protection.

The extent of job losses in India is more pronounced in urban areas than in most rural areas of the country due to the impact of the lockdown since March 25 this year. The lockdown will continue after May 17 in its fourth phase with some withdrawal of curbs to facilitate the starting of some selected industries and the transport, but the damage to the job market which has already been done duet to more than fifty days of lockdown till date, will take a long period to heal. The Indian workers who were already suffering from the slowdown of the last two years in the economy has been pauperised to a considerable extent. they will remain much poorer for long.

Okay Modi’s cabinet will give its approval. It cannot be disapproval. Modi’s word is final. Ask Nirmala Sitharaman, Union Finance Minister, she who cannot talk/tweet without hashtags @narendramodi and @PMOnarendramodi. It’s about a $265 billion economic stimulus package to rescue Covid-19 hit India. In Modi’s language, Bees Lakh Crore Rupayeh! The belief is the economic stimulus will extricate India out of the Covid-19 quagmire. And Modi outed it after a preamble that went on and on till it was beginning to irritate. If Shashi Tharoor’s English befuddles, Modi’s Hindi confounds.

The Prime Minister Narendra Modi suddenly addressed the nation on the night of May 12, almost a week before the end of the third stretch of the Lock down in combat with the pandemic corona virus. Instead of apprising the listeners of progress in the combat, he talked of self reliance, a hall mark of the Indian civilization and its imperative need now. He ended his address with a promise of Rs. two million crore package without specific details. Instead of jubilation, it generated disbelief. One comment that went viral on social media pointed out that he had put a cap on Rs. fifteen lakh earlier and now he wrapped pajama around Indians but without tier in their hands.