Welcome to The Political Fix by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan, a newsletter on Indian politics and policy. To get it in your inbox every week,...
Welcome to The Political Fix by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan, a newsletter on Indian politics and policy. To get it in your inbox every week, sign up here.
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The Big Story: Timing trouble
There have been promising developments over the last couple of weeks on Covid-19 vaccine development, with several teams moving into the third phase of clinical trials. Yet it would still be foolhardy to assume that there will be a working vaccine by September or October that would allow ordinary life to resume.
(Unless you are the Indian Council for Medical Research, which in the first week of July ordered a vaccine to be ready by August 15 – India’s Independence Day – only to retreat after scientists questioned the blatantly political, scientifically questionable demand.)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s chief economic advisor, KV Subramanian, acknowledged this week that India needed a fiscal stimulus, and would not be able to make do with all the liquidity on offer in the last package the government unveiled.
But he added a condition:
“The question [on a fiscal stimulus] is not about if, the question is about when. I think the right point would be, if...
