2020 turned out to be a year in which everything changed with the imposition of a stringent and total lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
By the end of the year, COVID-19 had officially infected 81 million people, and possibly 500 million more were never diagnosed.
It caused 1.8 million recorded deaths, with many more hundreds of thousands of deaths going unrecorded.
The year 2021 has commenced with countries across the world undertaking vaccination drives.
On January 3, 2021, India formally approved the emergency use of two vaccines and on January 16, it launched the world’s biggest vaccination drive, with plans to inoculate large numbers. The Indian Capital market has been surprisingly resilient during this continuing pandemic.
While the World Economic Outlook in its January 2021 edition hopes for a turnaround in the pandemic situation in the later part of 2021 particularly due to the vaccine approvals accorded across the world, it expresses concerns about renewed waves and newer variants of the virus.
It projects the global economy growing at 5.5 percent in 2020-21 and 4.2 percent in 2021-22.
The report has revised the forecast for the year 2021 up 0.3 percentage points relative to the previous forecast.
The Outlook has made these projections on the assumptions of additional policy support in a few large economies as also activities expected to be strengthened on the basis of vaccines being administered in the later part of the 2021 year.
However the report has also cautioned that the strength of the recovery may vary significantly across the countries, depending on the access to medical interventions, effectiveness of the policy support, exposure to cross-country spillovers, and structural characteristics entering the crisis or any major development in the economies.
The Government of India and Reserve Bank of India have undertaken multidimensional efforts to monitor financial stability and provide necessary regulatory support to ease both demand and supply constraints posed by the pandemic.
As per the Government’s First Advance Estimates released on 07.01.2021, India is projected to witness its first real GDP contraction of 7.7 percent in the current fiscal year.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF), however, on a positive note states that it expects India to resume its pre-COVID pre-slowdown trajectory by growing at 7.4 per cent in Financial Year 2021-22.
The Reserve Bank of India has forecast a 9.5 per cent growth in real GDP in 2021-22, while the Economic Survey 2020-21 has estimated growth in real GDP in 2021-22 at 11 per cent.
The Gross Domestic Product at constant (2011-12) prices, in the year 2020-21 is likely to reach a level of Rs 134.40 Lakh crores, as against the initial Provisional Estimate of GDP for the year 2019-20 of Rs. 145.66 Lakh crore, indicating a fall in GDP in real terms of (-) 7.7 per cent during 2020-21, as compared to the growth rate of 4.2 percent recorded in the previous year.
At current prices, GDP for the year 2020-21 is likely to reach a level of Rs. 194.82 Lakh crores as against the Provisional Estimate of GDP for the year 2019-20 of Rs. 203.40 Lakh crore.
(India CSR)
