India Essential Component In Global Action To Fight COVID-19, Says WEF Founder

India is a key constituent in the concrete global action to fight against COVID-19 pandemic, including large-scale production of vaccine, World Economic Forum’s Founder and Chairman Klaus Schwab said.

Moreover, India has a very important role to play to ensure greater international cooperation in the post-COVID world for fighting any pandemic in the future as well as combating global challenges like climate change and economic inequality, PTI quoted Schwab as saying.

Schwab, who founded WEF in 1971, said that COVID-19 is the most “devastating and immediate crisis the world is facing, but we are equally going through the worst environmental crisis in human history as well.”

“And socio-economically, the division and inequalities we are facing are the worst in a generation. To deal with it incrementally will not suffice. We need a Great Reset — a fundamental rethinking of our economies and of our societies. We must not only repair the damage but address major deficiencies in our economic and social systems which were apparent before the pandemic broke out,” Schwab said in an interview from Geneva.

“One of the priorities for the Great Reset is to redefine our social contract. That is particularly relevant for emerging economies like India, who have not yet built up social welfare systems to the same degree as some countries in Europe, such as the Scandinavian countries,” he added.

Stressing on efforts by the WEF, Schwab said, “We have indeed worked with all our global partners to accelerate the health response, and India certainly stands out.”

“Concretely, we have been working with the Developing Country Vaccine Manufacturing Network (DCVMN) on a potential Vaccines Manufacturers Alliance. And of this DCVMN, about 80 per cent of capacities are in India,” he added.

“We received a letter of support from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, about the principles of global equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, and this was very important. This new mechanism could take the form of a large multi-country contract manufacturing network to be built, with the goal of increasing the global manufacturing volumes to an additional capacity in line with the enormous global demand. India should be the essential hub of this network,” Schwab said.