Former Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian. (Express photo)

As Covid-19 pushes the economy into a recession, policy makers are struggling to balance the imperatives of public health and economic well-being. To discuss the contours of a prudent yet compassionate macro-economic policy framework, The Indian Express will host its first online Express Adda on Tuesday, with former Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian.

He will be in conversation in the Express Adda webinar with Harish Damodaran, National Editor, and P Vaidyanathan Iyer, Executive Editor (National Affairs).

Subramanian would likely reflect on the immediate and medium-term challenges facing the economy, the policy options before leaders, and the trade-offs there in. He has had first-hand experience with ideating and framing key structural reforms — from introduction of Goods and Services Tax to the Direct Benefit Transfer scheme — during his term as CEA in the Ministry of Finance.

A non-resident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a Visiting Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Subramanian’s presence couldn’t have been more timely as the government discusses a fresh fiscal relief package for the economy and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) continues with a series of measures to inject liquidity into the financial system.

With International Monetary Fund, World Bank and other leading institutions projecting the world economy to enter into a recession, Subramanian’s experience as a former policy maker and leading thinker would help in expanding the knowledge base on ways to mitigate and minimise the hardships imposed by COVID-19.

The Express Adda is a series of informal interactions organised by The Indian Express Group and features those at the centre of change. Among the recent guests were Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Chief Economic Advisor Krishnamurthy Subramanian, former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, author and political thinker Ashis Nandy, Carnatic musician T M Krishna, cancer specialist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee, and cricketer Cheteshwar Pujara.