COVID-19 could end up being a 'wasted crisis': Abhijit Banerjee

Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee feels that India's economic recovery has been slow and the uncertainty due to COVID-19 still looms large.

Banerjee also believes that India may have missed the economic opportunities due to the pandemic. "I think the govt’s primary commitment was to bail out the banks, and it couldn’t afford more than that. This was a time to do radical things, like selling the banks. In that sense, I think this is a wasted crisis, we could have done more on the fiscal side,"

Speaking at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit, Banerjee said: “We should not be pessimistic necessarily but I think there is no guarantee that we are out of the pandemic, because we don’t have a coherent explanation why it should be going down and vaccine right now it is a long way away, I am guessing another two quarters before anybody seriously gets vaccinated.”