India tackling another Covid-19 wave while maintaining economic growth: PM

Prime Minister Narendra Modi emphasized India's fight against another wave of Covid-19 caused due to the Omicron variant of coronavirus while maintaining the economic growth of the country

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday emphasized India's fight against another wave of COVID-19 caused due to the Omicron variant of coronavirus while maintaining the economic growth of the country.

Addressing a virtual meeting at the World Economic Forum's Davos Agenda, he said that India is tackling another wave of the pandemic with caution and confidence and moving ahead in the economic sphere with many hopeful results.

Underlining India's confident approach, the Prime Minister highlighted that when the world was focussing on interventions like quantitative easing during the Corona period, India was strengthening the reforms.

He listed strides in physical and digital infrastructure like optical fibre in 6 lakh villages, 1.3 trillion dollars invested in connectivity-related infrastructure, the goal of generation of 80 billion dollars through asset monetization and Gatishakti National Master Plan to bring all the stakeholders on the single platform to infuse new dynamism to the seamless connectivity of goods, people and services.

"Today India has the world's largest, secure and successful digital payments platform. Talking about last month alone, Unified Payments Interface in India, 4.4 billion transactions have been done through this medium," said PM Modi.

"The digital infrastructure that India has developed and adopted over the years has become a huge strength of India today. "Technological solutions like Arogya-SetuApp for tracking of Corona Infections and CoWinPortal for Vaccination are a matter of pride for India. From slot booking to certificate generation in India's Co-Win portal, the online system has attracted the attention of people from big countries as well," added the Prime Minister.

Applauding India's capability during the pandemic, he said, "Sensitivity is tested in times of crisis but India's capability is an example for the whole world at this time. During this crisis, the IT sector of India has saved all the countries of the world from great difficulty by working 24 hours a day. Today India is sending record software engineers to the world."

India has delivered 1154.173 lakh doses of COVID-19 vaccines to 97 countries till December 31, according to the Ministry of External Affairs.

Davos Agenda of the WEF is being held from January 17-21. Several heads of state will address the event. The event will also witness the participation of top industry leaders, international organisations and civil society, who will deliberate on critical challenges being faced by the world today and discuss how to address them.