 Hello and welcome to Dispatches from India where we bring you major news developments from around the country. In this episode, we take a look at the economic prospects for India, the latest from the COVID-19 front and the situation of doctors in Kashmir. Our first story is about the GDP numbers in India. The latest numbers released for the first quarter of 2021 give some signs of hope, but this could be illusive. With the second wave laying low the country in recent months, fresh questions have been raised about the prospects of the economy. The key question here is whether there will be any recovery in demand this year and unfortunately the answers do not look that great. Journalist Alindya Chakravarty analyzes this issue. So it's officially official now. This has been the worst year ever for India's economy, ever since India's independence. The last time our national income, which is the total income generated by all sectors, everyone in the economy contracted or reduced was in 1979, 42 years ago during the oil shock. When petrol prices went up across the world and there was a global recession. This time it's because of COVID. There has been a global recession. Almost every economy has been hit by it. India pretty badly. The only exception has been China, which grew marginally by about 2 odd percent in 2020. Now for India, if you look at the GDP numbers that have just come out on Monday, there are some green shoots, which is some positive numbers have come out for the first three months of this year. What we see is that private final consumption expenditure has grown by just a little bit above 2 percent, 2 and a half percent. That is pretty bad, right? Considering that manufacturing has grown, construction has grown, utilities have grown, services have grown, who was consuming all of that? Where has it gone? It suggests that households or people like you and me haven't been consuming it, right? Because that hasn't really grown. What has stood in for that is essentially government final consumption expenditure. Government has consumed and allowed these, the government sector consumed and allowed these factories to kind of grow. It allowed utilities to grow. And perhaps some of that construction is also showing up in the building of assets. So we are seeing government final consumption expenditure, what the government spends has gone up by 28 percent. There's an interesting thing here. So consumption has not revived. Now this is a problem. We know that the second wave actually peaked from April-May. So at least two months out of the three in the first quarter of this fiscal, which is 21-22, is going to see bad consumption growth, bad production, and yet an inventory which has been pushed out, yet investments for future consumption. So this is a worry. Now what that means is that when the economy begins to revive, demand begins to revive, there will already be production out there. So manufacturing might not keep pace. There will be a lag between consumption by households and what manufacturers are producing or what services are being given out. So if real estate and banking is a significant growth that we've seen in the first quarter of this year, by the time the second quarter comes, maybe the loans have already been given out. Maybe the houses have already been bought and sold and we might not find any demand for that later on. So what happens then? Manufacturing will drop. Factories will start reducing their production. Manufacturing growth will drop. Services might taper off and that effectively means even consumption of electricity, which a large part of which is actually industrial consumption, might actually drop. So these are problems because that means that we'll actually see growth in consumption but a drop in things like manufacturing and investment and therefore that suggests that these green shoots that we're seeing might just be an illusion and we might end up with another collapse, another recession in this year as well. Maybe the GDP numbers will show growth because remember there was a collapse last year, right? In the middle of last year there was a collapse in GDP. So you might see the next quarter showing a high GDP growth but if 100 drops to 50, even a 25% growth on that 50 is what? Just 12.5%. You just go back to 62.5. So that will look like great growth but it will still not be back to normal. So effectively we will take a very long time to return to where we are in the COVID period. That's the reality of the Indian economy and the only way to come out of it is to boost consumption demand and that only the government can do. The government has been sitting on it. It should have been done yesterday but it's still not very late to do it today and tomorrow. We now go to the latest on the vaccine front. India has been at the forefront of the demand to waive patents on COVID-19 vaccines at a global level. However, within the country the government has been slow in providing compulsory licensing for increasing the manufacture of vaccines. This is especially significant considering the vital need to vaccinate large numbers of India's population as quickly as possible. News Clicks Prabir Purkhoyasta and Dr. Satyajit Rath discuss these issues. Today we are going to discuss on the COVID-19 issue the controversy that has crept in about patents, patent protection and how important it is or it is not. Nithya Iyong has given a statement, of course, it has given a statement to say how the government of India has been doing very well on procurement of vaccines in face of the criticism that it has failed and failed quite badly to provide vaccines. One of the points in that 10-point refutation of quote-unquote negativity that is going around on the vaccine issue is that patents are not important. So we have Dr. Satyajit Rath Vita. So I'm going to ask him that we have been discussing this issue for quite some time and the fact that government of India along with South Africa has gone to the World Trade Organization precisely on this point saying patents should be relaxed or not be observed. Patents and other intellectual property rights should not be used to deny knowledge so that we can find the pandemic much better. Satyajit you have looked at the statement I'm sure of what the Nithya Iyong has said and also we have discussed this about what Mr. Bill Gates had said earlier. There are many similarities to both the statements. Well certainly in the first place the statement from the member health Nithya Iyong, Professor Vinod Paat is in the form of a piece of political publicity more than a technical claim for two reasons. Number one, when he's responding to a broad criticism about COVID-19 vaccine technologies in the plural and the intellectual property issues involved as restrictions to their widespread manufacturing distribution, what he responds with is an extraordinarily narrow wicket. So in the first level he responds by saying patents are not important, other forms of intellectual property protection such as trade secrets such as tricks of the trade and so on and so forth such as technology assimilation are important and the second issue that he brings in to narrow this conversation down is in order to give an example he uses the mRNA technology based vaccines namely the NIH Moderna and the BioNTech Pfizer vaccines which are actually not neither deployed in India nor are appropriated because of their ultra low temperature storage requirements for widespread usage in an Indian vaccination campaign. So really it's a very sort of selective usage of ground to stand on which to make a, all right let me use the word diplomatic response. Or an undiplomatic one because you're really contradicting what your government has gone to WTO report and then why did the government back this proposal if it didn't think it was important and second as you said he also wants to take a lot of kudos for having forced Bharat BioNTech to share its know-how with three other companies. So he seems to be quite aware of the fact that yes this is an issue on which they are on a weak wicket because his criticism has been made including by us that Bharat BioNTech why was it given a monopoly by the government of India and therefore he has to defend that as well. So instead of saying yes we made a mistake but now we are trying to rectify it he's trying to win brand new points on that. And finally we continue our features from various regions of the country on the impact of COVID-19. Today we look at a hospital in Anantnag in Kashmir where doctors talk about the issues they're facing. One major challenge is that there is no hospital that has been designated as a COVID hospital every single hospital has COVID patients. There is a sense of fear in everybody if someone says they don't feel fear that is not true because the situation is such that we have seen firsthand some harsh realities in hospitals right now. We do feel fear when we hear about our fellow interns getting infected. These are the things we have witnessed we fear it could happen to us as well. Irrespective interns where posted we are exposed to COVID patients and as equivalent as the senior residents there. We go home we are exposed and it's a possibility that our parents can get infected. We are day scholars and we head back home so it's always so there is a nagging fear that I can be a carrier of infection. That's all we have time for today we'll be back next week with more news from the country until then keep watching People's Dispatch. For more videos and people's struggles please subscribe to our YouTube channel.