India’s per Capita GDP to reach 2019 levels in 6 months: OECD has said.

Despite being hit by a devastating second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, India will reach back to its 2019 calendar year gross domestic product per capita levels by the end of 2021. This is as per the latest data by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The OECD has mapped the time it will take for G-20 nations to reach their own GDP-per capita levels before the COVID-19 pandemic. It takes a base of per-capita GDP as on December 31, 2019.

As per the data, China, Turkey, South Korea, Russia and the United States have already reached their pre-pandemic GDP levels as of June 1, 2021. Germany, India and Indonesia will reach those levels by the end of this year, while a host of other countries including Saudi Arabia, Britain, Brazil, and France will take longer.

South Africa and Argentina will take the longest to reach their December 2019 per-capita GDP levels, at five years and 6.75 years respectively.

As per the GDP data released by the National Statistical Office on May 31, India's real per-capita GDP for 2020-21 fiscal year fell 8.2 percent, compared with a 3 percent rise in 2019-20.

COVID-19 Vaccine

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a vaccine work?

A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

How many types of vaccines are there?

There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind?

Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time.

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