Archives: Event

Sajjid Chinoy, Usha Thorat, Sonal Varma, and Sudipto Mundle

in conversation with

Shekhar Shah

As the race between the virus and the vaccine quickens, all eyes are on the Union Budget 2021-22 that the Finance Minister will present on February 1.    How will the 2021-22 Budget vaccinate the Indian economy?

NCAER’s Mid-Year Review 2020-21 released on December 21 as part of its quarterly N-QRE (NCAER-Quarterly Review of the Economy) series forecast India’s GDP contracting by about (-) 7.3 percent in FY2020-21, an upgrade from forecasts earlier in the year.  Views differ on whether the next fiscal year 2021-22 will see a strong cyclical upsurge and a sustained push to normalization, or whether what we are seeing is the “forced savings” of the better-off during the pandemic temporarily boosting demand, but likely to flatten out as some Q3 data have suggested. The ‘vaccine pivot’ will clearly help in either situation as private sector activity returns to pre-COVID levels and if central government spending continues its recent pick up. Overlaid on this will be the 15th Finance Commission recommendations that will start shaping the Centre-State fiscal space.

On Wednesday, January 27^th, NCAER  hosted a lively pre-Budget discussion featuring Sajjid Chinoy, JP Morgan’s Chief India Economist, Usha Thorat, former RBI Deputy Governor, Sonal Varma, Managing Director and Chief Economist for India at Nomura, and Sudipto Mundle, NCAER Distinguished Fellow. The discussion was moderated by NCAER Director General, Shekhar Shah. Over 120 participants attended this webinar.

The panelists reflected on difficult questions such as how should the Union Budget balance nudging the economy to good health and regaining growth momentum with ensuring medium-term fiscal sustainability? What fiscal impulses must the FM provide in her first post-COVID Budget to help India catch up with 2019-20 real GDP levels and simultaneously try to cut the headline deficit?  How should the fiscal managers at the Centre and in State capitals manage expenditure priorities for reviving jobs and incomes, particularly for those at the bottom of the income pyramid, in informal jobs, and in MSMEs? How will the RBI support and lead the return to normalcy?  What are the macroeconomic and structural reforms that India must undertake, starting now and over the next two to three years, to ensure that the economy catches up over the next four to five years with its pre-pandemic growth path? How might this recovery be best financed?

What will be the best vaccine for the Indian economy? 

Part 2 of the NCAER-Nossal Longitudinal Household Study

India has just begun its virus vs vaccine race with the roll-out of the Covishield and the Covaxin vaccines. Vaccinating India’s billion plus population as equitably and as quickly as possible will be India’s grand public health challenge. Meeting this challenge, and guiding policy and programs to promote rapid recovery, requires policymakers at the Centre and in India’s States to understand the impact of the pandemic on incomes, jobs, migration, availability of essentials, and health and health service use.

On January 22, NCAER returned with findings from Part 2 its longitudinal household telephone survey on the pandemic’s impact on households in Odisha and Uttar Pradesh.  The study is being done in collaboration with the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne in Australia. For this webinar, NCAER hosted NCAER’s Fellow Prabir Kumar Ghosh and NCAER’s collaborators at the University of  Melbourne’s Nossal Institute for Global Health,  Barbara McPake, Ajay Mahal and Sumit Kane. The discussion was moderated by NCAER Director General, Shekhar Shah.

For the Round 2 of this study, we polled 2,000 households during October 7-21, 2020 in Bargarh and Dhenkanal districts in Odisha and Chandauli and Firozabad districts in UP.  Of these, 1,340 households were repeated from Round 1, when we interviewed 2,068 households during June 9-18, 2020.  Part 2 of this study provides a view of how households were coping with the pandemic just after India had passed its peak daily infection rate in mid-September.  Round 1 had reported on conditions in the second week after the end-May lifting of the lockdowns. The Odisha-UP surveys are also gauging perceptions about the return to work, concern for one’s neighbours, the reliance that can be placed on others, fears related to the virus and isolation, and faith in government’s ability to handle the pandemic.   The sample households for this study come from a larger NCAER-Nossal study funded by the Gates Foundation on “Health Seeking Behaviour in Four Indian States”.

The presentation is available on this webpage

The earlier round of this telephone survey is available here.

Five investor education workshops with financial regulators

Workshop II: Investor Education and Protection in the Insurance Sector 

NCAER’s newly established Investor Education and Protection Fund (IEPF) Chair Unit’s hosted second of the series of five workshops on Investor Education and Protection with financial regulators. This session, focusing on insurance sector, was held virtually and was attend by over 40 participants.

India’s 2014 Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana programme helped create robust digital financial services, increasing the proportion of those above the age of 15 with a bank account to nearly 80% in 2017, compared to just about 35% in 2011. Digitization has brought banking to many more during the pandemic. The National Strategy for Financial Education 2020-25 recognizes the unique challenges of creating a financially aware and empowered India, and the need for convergence of efforts by multiple stakeholders that regulate and manage India’s financial resources.

The second NCAER workshop in its investor education and protection series focuses on the National Strategy’s operations in the Indian insurance sector. Having opened up to private and global players at the turn of the century, India broke 60 years of public sector monopoly that had resulted in lower-than-expected insurance penetration and density. However, India’s insurance density and penetration, both measures of the development of the insurance sector, is still considerably low by global standards as well as in comparison to other countries in the per capita income peer group. Post the opening up of the sector in the late 1990s, the growth of the sector came with its own costs and benefits. Issues in the sector include sub-optimal product structures, opaque disclosures, high commissions to agents with little incentive to serve the customer, and poor performance on persistency and claims settlement.

This workshop will feature insights from leading insurance market experts as well as insurance markets regulator Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI). Subhash C Khuntia, Chairperson, IRDAI, will deliver the keynote address and the workshop will be chaired by T L Alamelu Whole Time Member (Non-Life Insurance), IRDAI. Amit Agrawal, Additional Secretary (Insurance), Department of Financial Services will outline the government’s perspective on the issues proposed for discussion.

The NCAER workshop series was inaugurated on December 16, 2020 with a keynote address by RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das, followed by the first workshop on securities market. This series of five NCAER workshops covers investor education issues in securities market, insurance, pension funds and credit markets. These workshops with key regulators are an opportunity for participants to both learn from key regulators about their strategies for investor education and to contribute to refining the priorities for action and for creating relevant further research and knowledge base in this area.

As the nation hopefully begins its recovery from the Coronavirus pandemic through a massive vaccine rollout, assessing the speed of recovery in different arenas of life will require a better understanding of the overall impact of the pandemic and the level of willingness among individuals to get vaccinated. In spite of the opening of the economy in recent months, employment and income levels have not seen a uniform recovery. Schools and colleges have remained shut since March 2020, and classes have begun only recently in some States. Moreover, the disruption of routine health services has emerged as a major area of concern in the wake of COVID-19. The recovery appears to be taking different pathways for different people, what some have called a K-shaped recovery.

NCAER hosted Sonalde Desai and Santanu Pramanik from its National Data Innovation Centre to share the results of Round 4 of its Delhi NCR Coronavirus Telephone Survey (DCVTS-4) launched on December 23, 2020 and completed on January 4, 2021. NCAER Director General Shekhar Shah moderated the discussion

DCVTS-4 builds on the three earlier rounds of the NCAER DCVTS, which were carried out in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic in April and June 2020. This fourth webinar will report its key findings on:

• The extent to which individuals are willing to get vaccinated and their willingness to pay for the vaccines;
• The extent to which students have been able to participate in online classes held by schools, and coaching centre-based and home-based learning during the period when schools have been closed;
• The manner in which health providers have coped in providing routine and emergency health care while dealing with the pandemic;
• Economic recovery, occupational shifts during the pandemic, and vulnerability among different occupational groups; and
• The levels of distress and financial hardship experienced by households and whether the most vulnerable households have had access to safety nets.
• DCVTS-4 resurveyed households contacted in the earlier rounds of DCVTS and completed interviews of 3,168 households (at a 61% response rate) from the rural and urban areas of Delhi NCR, which includes Delhi as well as rural and urban households from selected districts of Haryana, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. The webinar was attended by over 100 participant

NCAER DCVTS ‘Round 4’ Results and the ‘Press Release’ is available on this webpage.

As the world changes calendars after a grim, tumultuous year, Indians have been greeted with the welcome news of two domestically produced COVID-19 vaccines nearing emergency approval. If ever humankind needed reminding that healthcare is central to all economic and social wellbeing, 2020 certainly achieved that. Countries that had robust healthcare systems, and these were not necessarily the world’s richest countries, fared much better than others. Never before in India have health issues received the kind of attention they have in the past year. How can we leverage this attention to drive long-awaited health system reforms? Learning from the fault lines the pandemic has exposed, and the grit and valour healthcare workers have shown, how can we deliver affordable, accessible, comprehensive, and accountable healthcare to all Indians?

The challenges are many. There are deep structural weaknesses in India’s health systems, including inadequate financing, medical supplies, and personnel; irrational treatments, rampant profiteering, and a breakdown of trust and accountability. Gender, caste, class, religion, and community barriers exacerbate health inequalities. There is much to be done on all dimensions, promotive, preventive, and curative. But if ever there was a time to do it, it is now.

For its first Coronavirus Briefing of 2021, on Thursday, January 7, NCAER will host the well-known authors of this recent book to discuss what the pandemic is teaching us about critical health sector reforms that India needs. Speaking about this will be authors Chandrakant Lahariya, health systems and public policy expert, Gagandeep Kang, FRS, Professor at CMC Vellore, and Randeep Guleria, Director and Professor at AIIMS, New Delhi.  Professor Kang is also Co-Chair of the just-established Lancet Citizens’ Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System.

Sharing their insights on the book and on health system reforms will be Preeti Sudan, until mid-last year the Union Health Secretary and now a member of the International Panel for Pandemic Preparedness & Response, Devi Prasad Shetty, Chairman, Narayana Health, and NCAER Director General, Shekhar Shah. The discussion will be chaired by N K Singh, Chairperson of the 15th Finance Commission that has just completed its work and has paid special attention to health issues.