Amid dire economic forecasts, an urgent govt response is awaited

An economic relief package from the govt is overdue

Ahead of the spring meetings — or, this year, video conferences — of the Bretton Woods institutions, both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have released provisional outlooks for the year. Coming as they do during the unprecedented slowdown and disruption caused by the Covid-19 and the lockdowns required to combat it, the projections make for uncomfortable reading. The IMF, for example, has downgraded India’s growth in 2020-21 by more than five percentage points since its October 2019 forecast, and by almost four percentage points compared with its January 2020 forecast. It currently projects that growth in