India Enters Recession as Virus Pummels No. 3 Asian Economy (bloomberg.com) 64
India entered an unprecedented recession with the economy contracting in the three months through September due to the lingering effects of lockdowns to contain the Covid-19 outbreak. From a report: Gross domestic product declined 7.5% last quarter from a year ago, the Statistics Ministry said Friday. That was milder than an 8.2% drop forecast by economists in a Bloomberg survey, and and a marked improvement from a record 24% contraction the previous quarter. Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed one of the world's strictest lockdowns in March, sapping demand for non-essential goods and services. Despite the measures to stem the pandemic, the country is now home to the second-highest Covid-19 infections after the U.S. at 9.3 million cases. The second straight quarterly decline in GDP, pushes Asia's third-largest economy into its first technical recession in records going back to 1996. Financial and real estate services -- among the biggest component of India's dominant services sector -- shrank 8.1% last quarter from a year ago, while trade, hotels, transport and communication declined 15.6%. Manufacturing gained 0.6%, electricity and gas expanded 4.4% and agriculture grew 3.4%.
Economies need to go back to basics. (Score:4, Interesting)
1. What can your economy produce, that other economies cannot or will not?
2. Who are your competitors what do they do better than you at, and what do you do better than them at?
3. Do customers care about your advantages?
3. A. If Not can you find something new to give an advantage that the customer will care about.
3. B. If So, be sure to market that Advantage so others know about it.
4. Be sure to price the product in a way that you can sustain a workforce, keep the product producing, allow for realistic growth.
5. Reevalute your position over and over again.
6. Have a plan for emergencies (Plan for at least 3 months of downtime), where you can keep employees hired to prevent them from moving to a different place, because when you start up again you will want your skilled workforce.
This plan may not make you #1 economy but it should keep your economy steady with a happy workforce. In which over time being steady will allow yourself to improve.
Re:Economies need to go back to basics. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a nonsense statement made up be people who can't stand being under lock-down.
Tell me, how have lock-downs killed over 250,000 Americans? Where is the evidence? In what manner did they die? The suicide rate in the US is roughly 50K per annum, do you have any evidence of a huge increase in suicides?
Lock-down means to stay at home, normally staying at home is a safe thing to do and doesn't kill people.
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Strict lockdowns kill more than the virus.
That's a nonsense statement made up be people who can't stand being under lock-down. Tell me, how have lock-downs killed over 250,000 Americans?
He probably meant the lockdowns kill the economy, considering this article is primarily about economic damage not lives lost. Even that is nonsense, since nations that had stronger lockdowns which caused more mild summer infection levels had weaker recessions than nations who didn't have comprehensive lockdowns. The initial economic damage of the lockdown is like a side effect of an effective drug. It can be painful but it's much better than the alternative.
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The US has more resources than India.
They had masses of people abandon the cities to go back to their rural homes as income dried up. The level of food insecurity in India due to the lockdown and economic collapse is also incomparable to the US.
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Fair point, another point is that millions of people suddenly packing close in trains will spread the virus like wildfire.
Lockdown for a country like India is a lot different than the partial lock-downs we have in the west, so many jobs here are office based and can be done from home.
Google says "Some 196 million people are undernourished, and malnutrition is the top cause of death and disability." So yeah, I concede that in India lockdown is likely more dangerous than COVID. Not so in the west though.
My hu
Re: Economies need to go back to basics. (Score:2)
They didn't even have a chance to pack the trains, though. Those shut down at the same time as everything else. India literally had people walking or cycling hundreds of miles home.
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The level of food insecurity in India due to the lockdown ...
Farms aren't locked down
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The level of food insecurity in India due to the lockdown ...
Farms aren't locked down
DUH!
https://www.dw.com/en/coronavi... [dw.com]
https://pedl.cepr.org/publicat... [cepr.org]
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Tell me, how have lock-downs killed over 250,000 Americans?
It very well could, but it is very difficult to quantify. My wife is the mammographer at our local hospital. Mammograms were not considered a critical hospital service, so they were totally stopped for a few months during the initial COVID lockdown (she just transitioned to performing CTs and standard X-rays during that time). Now that they have resumed they are finding cancer at a higher rate than ever before in the diagnostic stage of testing (screenings are just general mammograms to find suspicious a
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This goes both ways, if no there is no lockdown, masks and social distancing then the virus spreads fast and hospitals get overwhelmed causing patients with other diseases to not get treatment.
Hospitals should perhaps treat the most important screening as 'essential' and not stop doing it.
Apricot kernels for cancer (Score:2)
Side note re: cancer. A good friend has been consuming 10 apricot kernels a day for over a decade and credits it for his full remission from metastatic prostate cancer (note, he started consuming them gradually to build up tolerance). He's got a scientific bent: he went off the kernels three times, and his PSA levels shot up each time -- returning to zero after he started taking them again. He's even taken a cyanide poisoning test which came back negative. He's informally advised several other people with
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Side note re: cancer. A good friend has been consuming 10 apricot kernels a day for over a decade and credits it for his full remission from metastatic prostate cancer (note, he started consuming them gradually to build up tolerance). He's got a scientific bent:
Ah Laetrile rears it's head. The concept of consuming cyanide as a cancer cure.
Has he tried Hydroxychloroquine and bleach injections yet?
So anyhow, such a simple cure doesn't even need FDA approval, so what is your conspiracy theory as to why people don't use it? Maybe Another Democrat hoax?
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Hey, don't shoot the messenger. This is someone I can vouch for, who in turn vouches for kernels helping himself and for several others (no money changed hands - he does not charge). Also, see the Facebook group for a letter from an NHS doctor talking about surprising remission for someone who credits the kernels.
No conspiracy allusions from me. Perhaps the difference is the source of the chemicals involved. My friend consumes bitter apricot kernels, NON-heat-treated, freshly cracked. Whereas, according to
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So: you do not wear masks but close parts of hospitals?
I need someone explaining me how that makes sense!
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Lock-down means to stay at home, normally staying at home is a safe thing to do and doesn't kill people.
Stay at home doesn't kill people unless those people are staying at home unemployed due to the lockdown and suffering mental issues, drinking themselves to death, getting fat and dying of heart attacks etc.
There was a study done recently that backs up the parent's claim but it made a metric shitton of assumptions. No it's unlikely to kill as many people as the virus, but the study did rightfully point out that simplifying an incredibly complex socio-economic discussion to "home = safe" is not the correct ap
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Lock-down means to stay at home, normally staying at home is a safe thing to do and doesn't kill people.
Stay at home doesn't kill people unless those people are staying at home unemployed due to the lockdown and suffering mental issues, drinking themselves to death, getting fat and dying of heart attacks etc.
people as the virus, but the study did rightfully point out that simplifying an incredibly complex socio-economic discussion to "home = safe" is not the correct approach.
It's kind of hard to imagine that people with mental issues didn't have them before they had to stay home to avoid death. And a couple months of relative solitude causes alcoholism?
When I hear all of the childish bellyaching about how people cannot handle a little bit of avoiding a death dealing disease, I really laugh.
If WW2 happened today, 290 million of the present day Americans would commit suicide by ma
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It's kind of hard to imagine that people with mental issues didn't have them before they had to stay home to avoid death.
That is a gross mischaracterization of mental health. Only a small subset of mental health issues are biological. Most of them are developed behaviors and the overwhelming majority are as a result of a dramatic change in your life. Depression especially is often triggered by changes in your life that don't go "according to plan". Losing your job is a big part of that. The USA especially suffers here due to the complete lack of a suitable social safety net both in terms of support for those struggling as wel
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It's kind of hard to imagine that people with mental issues didn't have them before they had to stay home to avoid death.
That is a gross mischaracterization of mental health. Only a small subset of mental health issues are biological.
I find it hard to imagine that I did say it was biological.
Most of them are developed behaviors and the overwhelming majority are as a result of a dramatic change in your life. Depression especially is often triggered by changes in your life that don't go "according to plan". Losing your job is a big part of that. The USA especially suffers here due to the complete lack of a suitable social safety net both in terms of support for those struggling as well as support for actual mental health issues.
I'm not exactly disagreeing with you. I know my outlook and mentality has been shaped by trauma during my lifetime. Some of that trauma was really unpleasant. But as an introspective person, I've also spent a lot of time mentally digesting that stuff. The idea isn't that I'm even well adjusted. But I've come through the social isolation phase pretty unscathed, outside of not being able to travel. But I've been able to adapt. Is this indicative of s
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It's hardly "hard to imagine" that being isolated for months (not a couple as you stated) wouldn't adversely affect those locked in.
https://www.euro.who.int/en/he... [who.int]
Let's start off with those millions of people in nursing homes who can't have visitors, and only see staff (my mother included...thankfully I bought her an iPhone and we are able to facetime, but for weeks, she went without).
Alcohol sales have been through the roof since the start. https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alco... [nih.gov]
I'm all for mask wearing and s
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It's hardly "hard to imagine" that being isolated for months (not a couple as you stated) wouldn't adversely affect those locked in.
https://www.euro.who.int/en/he... [who.int]
I do write from the perspective of someone who is just as happy going for weeks without contact with others as I am in contact with thousands of people in a day.
But - I still find that people who go off the deep end if they aren't in contact with others should give some introspection as to why that is the case. It is possible that some other stressors have been coming into play this year.
Let's start off with those millions of people in nursing homes who can't have visitors, and only see staff (my mother included...thankfully I bought her an iPhone and we are able to facetime, but for weeks, she went without).
That's certainly good - modern problems require modern solutions. For myself, I have made use of Zoom to do a lot of b
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That's a nonsense statement made up be people who can't stand being under lock-down.
Tell me, how have lock-downs killed over 250,000 Americans?
When dealing with the dummies that believe that we need to sacrifice the elderly and less healthy to Covid, I do like to point out that a not insignificant portion of the economy is housing for the near elderly and elderly. These people sign over a large portion of their retirement money to these places. When their customers die off, that is much less money going into the economy.
They get a little pissed off when I note that their solipsism is almost anti-capitalist in nature, and that they are personall
Re: Economies need to go back to basics. (Score:1)
Missed/late diagnosis, deferred/cancelled procedures, etc.
How many people died if undiagnosed cancers because they were too ascared to see their doctor/go to the ER?
How many elderly patients, unable to see any family members for months (with no end in sight) simply lost the will to stay alive?
How many seniors, forced to share rooms and residence wings of nursing homes dies of coronavirus from patients that were removed from hospitals and not properly segregated (per PA, NY, NJ, MI, and WI gov)?
Suicide isn't
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The virus kills either way but if it was left to spread unchecked then there would be millions dead in the US alone. Lockdowns are a compromise, whilst they may cause a few deaths, they save many.
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FWIW, I believe in masks and social distancing. I've had several relatives infected, thankfully none severely. That said, there's plenty of evidence showing that side effects of lockdowns cause plenty of issues as well. There does need to be a balance.
https://www.bbc.com/future/art... [bbc.com]
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FML, I'd expect the BBC to be a bit less sensationalist.
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There are plenty of other reliable sources. I chose them because they are generally trusted.
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It's not that I think they are unreliable in this instance, I just would like the BBC to not write headlines and sub-heads like a British tabloid newspaper. To be fair though it will attract the people who gravitate towards the most sensationalist headlines and get the story further on platforms like Facebook. My concern is the people who only ever read the headlines will be misled and have their judgements further clouded.
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Strict lockdowns kill more than the virus.
Tell that to Melbourne, Australia.
They just hit 28 days with zero new cases.
Their dashboard [vic.gov.au] (sadly very NoScript-unfriendly) shows the amazing decline - scroll down to the "Daily new cases in Victoria" graphs.
Some random Internet people might tell you that this is a normal virus recovery curve or try to make it seem like this was a natural occurrence. It was the result of an incredibly difficult and quite strict lockdown, mostly in Melbourne, involving lots of forced business closures and strong social dis
Re: Economies need to go back to basics. (Score:1)
Strict lockdowns kill more than the virus.
Tell that to Melbourne, Australia.
They just hit 28 days with zero new cases.
Do you see how your are comparing apples and oranges?
Your post-shutdown observation of zero new cases completely ignores the effects the draconian shutdown created.
I heard one city in Australia shutdown for six days because a worker in a pizzeria lied to contact tracers about actually working there, claiming he only visited the pizzeria briefly...
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Your post-shutdown observation of zero new cases completely ignores the effects the draconian shutdown created.
The original argument (supplied with zero evidence or even any sort of rationale) was that strict lockdowns kill more than the virus. This is sorta laughable on the surface; Melbourne would have been up to something like 1000 deaths a day now had they not had any lockdowns.
Maybe by "effects" you mean economic effects? The city I live in had its lockdown months ago and we are out the other side with zero local transmission for months now. Everything is open and has been for ages; there are very few restricti
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Much of your plan is only relevant for a command economy, not market economies. You have basically laid out a plan based on business strategy 101 principles and have applied them to an economy instead of a business. So this can apply to a country like China, but the way western countries can support their market economies would be far different. India arguably has enough crony capitalism that is could act like China does if it wanted to though.
Having a plan for emergencies though is certainly in the realm o
I don't for a minute believe this. (Score:3)
If India is reporting 1/3 the reported new cases the US is, it undoubtedly has more infections. The India has a population of 4 times that of the US but a per capita test rate 1/5 of the US.
Given the roughly 140 million tests India has administered, how representative do you think that test population is of the whole population? India has a very large middle class -- larger than the middle class of the US, in fact. But it also has a vast underclass that is very difficult to track. Even if they wanted to make their test population representative of the whole, they probably couldn't.
India's public health reporting is also highly suspect. Volunteers have been comparing death notices and obituaries to official counts, and even in those middle-class oriented open data sources they were finding a 70% higher death rate.
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You have to adjust your sense of scale for India. India's middle class is roughly about the size of the entire US population -- 300 - 350 million [wikipedia.org], depending on your definitions, or about 20% of the total population.
The lifestyle of the lower end of the middle class spectrum is quite austere by US standards; we'd probably call them poor. But as you go up in the spectrum it gets harder to compare lifestyles, especially as labor costs are so low. In a big city a household servant earns less than $1000 per yea
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The car, obviously!
How else would I drive my kid to school?
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This. When it comes to a nation's virus stats, I tune out absolute numbers. I tune out case rates. Although no metric is perfect, a per capita increase in mortality is the best standard for comparing nations. India's fundamentals are apparently worse than the USA's. You've got a lot of people crowded in cities who routinely ride ridiculously crowded public transit. If they were really doing better than us, you'd want to look at genetics, mask compliance, or some magic hand sanitizer that they somehow h
Differences in per capita increase in mortality (Score:2)
The per-capita COVID-19 mortality in the US and the UK is factors of magnitude over several other countries -- not just India, but also Latvia, Estonia etc -- other countries with roughly comparable healthcare systems, age composition, and reporting mechanisms
You can fiddle with adjusting statistics for underlying health conditions, but something else is causing such a large difference.
What beats me is why the best minds in the world are not working day and night on eliciting the true reasons for difference
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What beats me is why the best minds in the world are not working day and night on eliciting the true reasons for differences in national impact.
Yes, me too. We may not know for years, if ever. There might also be different strains of the virus that interact with different genomes and health conditions, spreading at different rates. The slowdown in world travel may have protected India for now, but when things loosen up they could be in for a shock. If things loosen up though, it'll probably be because
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India hat a lot of provinces that had an extremely strict lock down and contact tracing, long long before USA did anything. The second wave might hit them harder than the first one, though.
https://www.sciencemag.org/new... [sciencemag.org] (Take with a grain of salt, no idea why they call her "Communist" )
https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
Ofc, that was in the beginning of the year.
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The problem is there are so many people there who both off the radar screen and completely unable to comply with an order to stay home for weeks on end. They live a hand to mouth existence.
So I suspect the numbers we have seen may represent the impact of the pandemic and the measure taken on a more easily monitored segment of the population. What we've seen since mid September is a dramatic drop in reported cases but with very little slackening in the death rate. The median time from case report to death
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In India the numbers appear to be hardly coupled at all, which means we're missing something.
That can be the difference in time when it is reported versus time it is published on sites like this: https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
During the first wave many countries had alternating days with 0 death and 500 - 800. Which obviously make no sense. At the moment I do not find a good example country, but in April Itally e.g. reported nearly no one dead or even zero one day, and next day 800 or more.
Yes, the time
Re: I don't for a minute believe this. (Score:1)
India hat a lot of provinces that had an extremely strict lock down and contact tracing, long long before USA did anything.
Really? Starting when? My quick googling shows initial tabs at 'people's shutdowns' around March 21st. How long after that did America start doing 'anything'?
I remember my kid coming home for spring break and never going back to school - that was in TX, around the end of March.
Citations please, and a definition of 'long, long before' would be nice.
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Well, :P
I linked two articles that showed they started in January, you could have clicked on them
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She is a member of the "Communist party of India (Marxist)". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And across the world, I see mostly "left" politicians taking Covid much more seriously than "right" - even though left and right are not highly descriptive as categories of politicians.
Though "lot of provinces" is an overstatement. Kerala was somewhat unique. In late February, India was hosting Mr Trump boasting about "yuuge" crowds spreading whatever CoronaVirus was present at the moment.
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India and the US are not comparable for many many more reasons than just these. But the number of tests is a confounding variable. Here, I am also answering some of your other posts in this thread :
1. Different genetics. Also see related point 3.
2. You do mention public health reporting. I'll add that there is a long term (body of) studies showing that half the deaths are unreported in India : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov] are unreported. This number could easily have risen dramatically in periods of cr
Re: Impossible (Score:1, Flamebait)
You have no idea how much I relish your tears over Trumpâ(TM)s loss.
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Indias infection rate is 0.69%. Double the cases and you get Germany. Triple it you get Romania. Quadruple you pass by Italy and Sweden to get to Portugal. Meanwhile, you'd have to quintuple the rate to match the US. And it gets worse once you start isolating red states. North Dakota's per capita rate is 14x higher! And that's with a population density less than 1% of India's!
Why absolute numbers (Score:2)
That's not a failure. India has 1.35 billion people. That's a 0.69% infection rate, which beats European/North American/South American counties by a wide margin.
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Failure is relative.
Hello from Melbourne. We had 700 cases a day. We now have zero cases a day.
That number is set to spike back up as soon as we let dual citizens from countries such as India back through our disastrous hotel quarantine.
Sort your shit out, World. We'd love to welcome international travelers back to our shores.
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Yes, Melbourne (actually Victoria, I have no Melbourne specific numbers) had half the rate of cases of India. That's very good. (Although Victoria has 1/20th the population density, which in a pandemic matters a lot.) However, you repeated the absolute cases, not the infection rate. Like, a cruise ship has less than 700 cases a day - it's still worse to be than Melbourne during the worst of it.
I'll also point out that NZ and Australia have summer weather right now, which would be limiting the spread.
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You assume they actually know how many people are infected. They've only done 72% as many tests at US (136MM for India vs 187MM for the US), while having 4 times as many people.
Remote work from home (Score:3)
A problem with a number of countries with low income is the workforce does not have the hardware, nor the internet access, at home to support working remotely. In countries like the US it's a foregone conclusion that the infrastructure exists for high speed internet at most residences allowing a much easier transition.
Further, the workstations the employees use are shared by staff across multiple shifts, and are desktop systems that aren't very portable. So there aren't enough computing devices to begin to supply the number of workers with the hardware to work at home.
These kinds of factors drastically decrease the productivity and increase the basic cost of doing business if the workers cannot work in their dense office spaces / cubical farms. It's an equalizer which takes away some of the financial advantages that allow these kinds of developing countries to undercut globally with much cheaper services.
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India and similar economies have a much smaller white collar, intellectual production class than the West does. Most of their population are farmers, small manufacturers and shopkeepers. Jobs that require workers to show up and interface with each other and the public. You could drown the county in high speed broadband and state of the art computing power. But if most people have to make daily treks through open air markets to feed themselves, and they work there as well, lockdowns pretty much kill the econ
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A problem with a number of countries with low income is the workforce does not have the hardware, nor the internet access, at home to support working remotely.
This is the world's customer support call centre you're talking about.
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You can rest assured that in Asia the internet connection of the average Joe is better than for most wealthy Americans. I suggest to visit it once, when/if the borders are open again.
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> A problem with a number of countries with low income is the workforce does not have the hardware, nor the internet access
Everyone with a computer job in India can afford an adequate computer and Internet access is dirt cheap with an actual free market, unlike US. The plans start at around $3/month with way more data allowances than US plans. The "hardware" that can launch a web browser, a remote desktop client and Zoom is rather cheap these days, even by Indian standards.
The difference is that most peo
India's economy was already doing badly precovid. (Score:1)
The economy was already slowing down from Modi's incompetency, such as take currency out of the economy dropping liquidity and demand, and major changes in taxes which messed up the supply side. This what happens when you have religious nutjobs lead a country. The only reason why India's economy in the beginning of Modi's presidency looked like it was doing better was because they changed how GDP was calculated in the country, which gave it a few percentage points more. They changed it such that occupati