The post-Covid scenario in India and around the world is bound to be a long and hard struggle for both peoples and the governments. The weeks-long lockdown affected many major economies and tamed their money power. This will impact the global economy. Both the US and China have slumped to negative growth levels and production in China is seriously affected. The world, particularly India and the US depended largely on Chinese goods as also raw material for various sectors – like pharmaceuticals in India, as was prominently highlighted recently. There are question marks on the future for the entire world, post-Covid.
Nations including India are now planning for the post-Covid steps for faster revival of the national economies. Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a meeting to shape strategies for attracting more foreign investment to India as also to promote local investment in ways that will absorb the lockdown shock. The point to note is that despite major thrust by the Modi Government in its first term to, ‘Make In India’ and other endeavours, Foreign Direct Investment was hard to come by. What came in was too little.
Those aspiring to come in are put off by the bureaucratic red tape and corruption here. The ease of doing business has not improved one bit even after the Liberalisation process. Industrialists and entrepreneurs still have to pay up rent-seeking politicians and bureaucrats. to get things moving. This is so for even those within the country who want to invest and start a business or industry. The six years of the Modi government made no difference to this scenario, though he came to power in 2014 on the plank of an anti-corruption campaign against the UPA-II.
One hope here is that multinationals leaving China because of the sharp downturn in economic activity there in the context of the Covid-19 spread would look to India for investment. In China, investors have a smooth sail, because not every ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’ would seek to put a spoke into the wheel with ulterior motives or to extract bribes or protection money even for moving papers from one table to another.
Also, the Japanese involvement in India’s bullet train project – between Mumbai and Ahmedabad – is worth citing. With a change of government in Maharashtra, the project is as good as abandoned. What message such rash steps would send out to the world of investors from abroad is all too clear. PM Modi could not set things right here; and the system itself needs a lot of corrections, which have not been attempted.