Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi held an interaction with economist and former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan on the socio economic situation in the country during the lockdown.

Rajan said there has to be a prioritisation from the Centre's part. "Our capacities and resources are limited. Our fiscal resources are more limited than the West. What we need to do is to decide, how do we keep this economy together. When we reopen, is it sort of able to walk off the sick bed and not be dead at that point? Most immediately, keep people well and alive. Food is extremely important. Places where public distribution system doesn’t go. Amartya Sen, Abhijeet Bannerjee and I have talked about temporary ration cards. But you have to treat this pandemic as a situation that is unprecedented," Rajan said.

He said the country needs to break norms to tackle what is needed. "While keeping in mind that there are overall budgetary limits. There are only so many resources that we have," the reputed economist said.

He said approximately Rs 65,000 crore is needed to help the poor. "Our GDP is 200 lakh crores, and out of that 65,000 crore is not a huge amount. So, we can do it. If this is for the poor and to save their lives and livelihood, we must do it," he said.

Reiterating the importance of direct benefits transfer, he said different ways of accessing poor people through widow pensions, MGNREGA rolls should be sought. "We need to say that look these are people who don’t have a job, who don’t have a livelihood and for the next 3-4 months while the uncertainty is on, we are going to support them.

But in terms of priority, keeping people alive and keeping them from going onto the street protesting or going out looking for work during lockdown is probably useful at the time of the lockdown. We need to find ways of getting both money as well as food through PDS to as many of these people as we can," he said.

Rajan said the opportunity for India is in shaping that dialogue. "Being more of a leader in that dialogue because it is not one of the two big warring parties. But it is a big enough country to have its voice heard in the global economy. In this situation, India can find opportunities for its industries, for its supply chains. But most importantly, we can try and mould the dialogue towards one which has greater place for more countries in the global order, a multi polar global order rather than a single or a bipolar global order," he said.

He said decentralisation is important both for bringing more local information to work but also about giving empowerment to the people. "What you see across the world is a great sense of disempowerment. Decisions are being made elsewhere, but not by me.

I have a vote but that elects somebody in a far-off place. My local panchayat, State government has less power. They don’t feel they can have a voice in anything. So they become prey to different set of forces," he added.

Rahul Gandhi said is the Panchayati Raj system is in retreat. "So, lot of the forward movement that had taken place on Panchayati Raj, we are sort of moving back to this bureaucratic, DM-bureaucrat based structure. If you look at the Southern States, they are doing a better job because they are more decentralised. The northern States are centralising power and they are taking away power from the panchayats and grassroots organisation," Gandhi said. 

Rajan expressed concern at the growing inequality of wealth and income in developed countries. "The precariousness of jobs, the so-called precariat is another source of concern. You have these gig jobs without knowing if you’ll have any income tomorrow.

We have seen during this pandemic that many of these people do not have any support. They have lost out on both their incomes and safety net. Therefore, what we have today is both a problem of slowing growth. We can’t dispense with markets; we do need growth. We also have a problem of stuck or inadequate distribution. People aren’t getting the fruits of that growth in the same way. Many people are being left out. So we need to think about both sides.That’s why I feel like rather than focus on distributing output, focus on distributing opportunities," he added.