COVID-19 and India’s GDP Growth Estimation for 2020-21

The spread of COVID-19 has ushered in a new concept of ‘lock down’ across the globe. Though ‘lock down’ was the only available alternative to a country like India and so far it has paid off to a large extent to contain the spread of the disease, it has serious economic costs. To estimate the economic cost we should understand the ground realities and not become unnecessarily pessimistic. Simultaneously, we must not undermine the economic losses we had to incur to combat this COVID pandemic and become patriotic about our GDP growth prospects. This paper has attempted to estimate India’s GDP growth through some broad calculations. It has found that in all probabilities India is going to have a negative real GDP growth of 6.8 per cent in the current fiscal year 2020-21. Given the spread and extent of the pandemic, if the country takes some more time to return to normalcy, India may even end up with a near double digit negative real GDP growth in spite of the fiscal stimulus measures taken by the government so far.