Do it yourself

Last week we travelled through seven districts spread across all three divisions of Himachal Pradesh. In five days we drove through Sirmaur, Solan Shimla Districts (Shimla Division); Bilaspur, Hamirpur and Mandi Districts (Mandi Division) and Una district (Kangra Division). The journey was mostly through lower Himachal, except few areas of Shimla district that lie in upper Himachal. The objective was to assess the current socio-economic and political conditions of the state and sentiments of the people ahead of elections scheduled in November 2022. The following are some of the key observations made during the trip.   There are no signs of Covid-19 pandemic in the state. Masks are mostly absent from the faces of the people as well as shops. Only room service staff at expensive hotels are seen wearing masks while attending guest calls. The customary hand sanitizer bottles put up in hotel lobbies, shops and offices are mostly empty. Most of the people we spoke to remember Corona as a...

An old market proverb is that "markets stop panicking when the government begins to panic". However, the current market conditions appear defying this conventional wisdom. Instead, the panic shown by the government authorities in dealing with the threat posed by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has caused deeper panic in the financial markets. From the statements made and actions taken by various state authorities across the world (including India) to check the spread of the coronavirus, I decipher the following: (a)    The coronavirus has spread to a large number of countries. Even though the mortality rate of patients suffering from the virus may not be high, the transmission is much faster, and it threatens large scale immobility or people and disruption of business. In that sense it is perhaps one of the most disruptive pandemic for the modern generation. The spread of bubonic plague in 19th century (though that had massively higher mortality rate) could ...