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Pre-existing condition

Tom Easton: South Asia business and finance editor, The Economist

India’s economy was ill before the coronavirus crisis—and will still be unwell
when it has passed

AS INDIA’S PRIME MINISTER, Narendra Modi, likes to say, now should be India’s
moment. The West’s disputes with China mean that trillion-dollar supply chains are up
for grabs. India has the abundant land mass needed for manufacturing, the long
coastlines needed for shipping, the millions of under-employed young people needed
for labour and a vast pool of software engineers, all of which should make it a worthy
alternative to the vexing communist state to its north, or at the very least a complement.

But even before the spread of covid-19 crushed India’s economy, conditions were
deteriorating as companies found its virtues more evident in theory than reality. GDP
growth has been declining since 2016, and investment since 2018. Annual vehicle sales
reported in March 2020 (ie, almost entirely pre-lockdown) were lower than they had
been a year earlier. As the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, an independent
research firm, put it, industrial production went “from down to downer”.