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There are really two issues that we have to watch very closely. One is what will be the overall severity of the pandemic for India, i.e., how long will the lockdown happen because that has economic effects. And the second, what is the level of collaboration both within the country and with other countries because eventually to answer your question on the economy, our take is that several scenarios can play out and scenarios as you know are based on hypothesis. But we would believe that you would expect a recovery which could be almost nine to 12 quarters away.
So this is something that is not going to go away in a hurry. You are talking about an economic impact that will last for a minimum of 12 to 24 months. In the sense that, over that period you will get the U-shaped recovery; you will start getting the rise but there will be a period when we will have to just button up and sit through it because what we are really looking at here is a crisis which is similar to the world war because this is actually a war against the pandemic, which has crossed borders and is moving across countries.
Allies in the form of companies will get together with the governments and a large number of those companies are those which are platform companies, for example. There will be a lot of technology change, a lot of technology usage, and a lot of our norms on technology and around data privacy will change going forward. So there is really a huge period of transformative change that will take place in these 24 to 36 months.
We have seen a disruption both on the demand side and on the supply side. Now supply can be restored but on the demand front, what is your understanding?
I would go beyond just looking at demand and supply because we would be fundamentally mistaken if we were to say that what we want to achieve is to get back to normalcy. The objective of a stimulus would not just be to say that we will get back to where we were. As I said, to give the analogy of a war, when you finish with a world war, you want to get back better than what you were; therefore, a lot of the old norms have to change and we have to look at what we call the next normal. So I think it will just go beyond demand and supply.
But on the specific issue of demand, certain sectors will recover faster than the others. We are fortunate also in a sense to say that the crisis on oil is not affecting us adversely. It is in fact beneficial to us; so there are good things happening and bad things too. But ultimately, we should not look to be in the same position as we were before the crisis. We should all be targeting and saying what can we do to get out stronger when this is over.
What do you think companies are likely to do or have already decided they would do when the lockdown gets over? Will it be job losses, cost cutting, more automation? What is plan A and plan B which companies are working on?
It depends on the situation and circumstances. You have larger companies; smaller depend on the industry in which you are. It depends on how asset-heavy you are. It depends on whether you have more people reliant and dependent but broadly I would say that people are looking at short term as well as medium term things.
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