On Thursday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the Davos Agenda Summit of the World Economic Forum (WEF) via a video link.
During his address, PM Modi lauded India’s fight against the global Coronavirus pandemic and the government’s firm resolve to help other nations. PM Modi informed that India has successfully been conducting the world’s largest vaccination program, with over 2.3 million health workers being vaccinated in the past 12 days. He added that the government is planning to vaccinate over 300 million elderly and those with co-morbidities in the next phase.
He further said that during the initial outbreak of the pandemic, several ‘experts’ had made false assumptions about India being in a perilous state. He said, “…At the beginning of last year, several experts and organizations had made several predictions that India would be most affected by the pandemic. Someone had even said that 700-800 million would be infected and someone had said that over two million Indians would die from the pandemic.”
PM Modi emphasised, “India, however, took a proactive public participation approach and developed a Covid-specific health infrastructure and trained its resources to fight Covid”. He added that over 1 lac foreign nationals were rescued by India and that a whopping ₹1.8 trillion was sent to 760 million people. He said that the government was not only able to put a check on the number of fatalities but also supplied essential medicines, PPEs and masks to over 150 countries. “Today, India is sending its vaccine to several countries and is helping in developing the infrastructure for successful vaccination, thus saving lives of citizens of other countries,” PM Modi reiterated.
Solving major problems through technological solutions. #DavosAgenda pic.twitter.com/TGGacLmQz3
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) January 28, 2021
PM Modi highlighted India’s robust digital infrastructure that is a case study for the experts of the WEF. He added that technology has been a part of life for Indians because of widely available digital solutions. 1.3 billion Indians have universal ID ‘Aadhar’ where there mobile phones and bank accounts are linked. Just in the month of December, Indians transacted over 4 billion Rs through UPI. Major nations around the world are trying to emulate the UPI system developed by India. So many nations around the world struggled to make benefits available to struggling populations during the coronavirus lockdown. But India sent direct benefits worth Rs 1.8 trillion rupees to 760 million people during this period.
PM Modi on making India strong on the economic front
The Prime Minister pointed out that India never lost sight of the economic challenges that came along with the pandemic. He said that the government took pro-active steps to keep the economy running, provide employment opportunities, and build infrastructure worth trillions of rupees. He added, “India has stressed a lot on reforms and incentive-based stimulus in recent times. Even during Covid, India has paced structural reforms in all sectors. These reforms are being supported by PLI-schemes.” PM Modi said that India has all the four components, required for Industry 4.0 strategy, including, connectivity, artificial intelligence, automation and real-time data.
PM Modi asserted that India’s success story is a major part of the success story of the world. He said India’s Aatmanirbhar Bharat mission is committed to global good and global supply chain. India has the capacity, capability and reliability to help the global supply chain.
