NEW DELHI: India stands out as an essential component to a concrete global action plan being readied to fight COVID-19, including for largescale vaccine manufacturing, World Economic Forum’s founder and chairman Klaus Schwab has said. Besides, India has a very important role to play for ensuring greater international cooperation in the post-COVID-19 world to fight any future pandemic and for addressing some other serious global challenges including those posed by climate change and economic inequality, he said.
Schwab, who founded WEF over 50 years ago, said 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 told PTI in an interview from Geneva.
“One of the priorities for the Great Reset is to re-define 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 said.
The WEF, which describes itself as an international organisation for public-private partnership, has been playing a key role in bringing together the public and private sectors in dealing with this pandemic.
Asked about these 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 said.
Schwab further said, “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 has recently co-authored a book, titled ‘The Great Reset’, which deals with top priorities before business leaders and policymakers around the world in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
The book also talks about whether the world should get back to where it was before, or should it take the opportunity to make society fairer, smarter and greener, and get humanity off the road to climate catastrophe.
Asked what are the most important steps that businesses and governments need to take to make them ready for such pandemics in the future, Schwab said businesses and governments should devote a lot of their time and energy to make sure that the decisions they are making today, are not only helping them weather the current crisis, but allow them to build a more sustainable, resilient and inclusive system for the long-term future.
—PTI

Press Trust of India