life wins over adversity' In the context of corona pandemic.
Answers
Answer:
In every adversity lies an opportunity is an age-old adage and has never been truer than the current COVID-19 pandemic. As an extension, it could also be said that greater the adversity, greater will be the opportunity, particularly for a diverse country like India.
As we evolve as a modern progressive democracy, there are still deep-rooted opinions and traditions that tie us down, on many occasions causing extreme hindrances where none need to exist. These are only exasperated by the contrasts created by religious beliefs, politics, urban or rural divide, race, caste, and language. In fact, there are not many occasions where the country is unified in a larger sense of purpose, except in times of grave adversity and hence this adversity whilst brutally unfortunate and undeserved is a call to reform and bring about deep-rooted changes.
In fact, our short history as an independent nation is replete with such examples. The food shortage of the 1950s brought about the green revolution in Punjab and the northern plains. The milk shortage ushered in operation flood, catapulting India from being a recipient of donated milk powder from western nations to becoming the largest producer of milk in the world. The depletion of foreign exchange reserves leading to a mortgage of our sovereign gold in the 1990s to building one the largest forex reserves amongst its cohort and saving our national animal, the tiger from inevitable extinction to record populations through the project tiger programme.
The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) tested us significantly, but for the most part, did not hurt us as much as it did to other developed and leveraged economies. Evidently, our reforms coming from that event are not noteworthy.
The current crisis, however, is scary and has galvanised this government into a measure that has never been witnessed before by humanity; a three-week “lockdown” of 1.3 billion people is a perfect example of that. It would be no exaggeration to term this as an existential threat for our citizens. Whilst I do not have the slightest doubt that we will recover, it calls for unleashing deep reforms that would not otherwise be possible to bring about through conventional consensus.
Coincidentally, the government of the day also enjoys an absolute majority in both houses of the parliament, the only limitation being the imagination and planning.
One of the major themes emerging from this pandemic will be greater hygiene and sanitation, backed by better healthcare. There are several minor themes that emerge such as supply chains and self-sufficiency of goods and emergency supplies, but none as compelling as the former.
Explanation: