Narendra Damodardas Modi (born 17 September 1950) is an Indian politician serving as the 14th and current Prime Minister of India since 2014. He was the Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014 and is the Member of Parliament for Varanasi. Modi is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist volunteer organisation. He is the first prime minister outside of the Indian National Congress to win two consecutive terms with a full majority and the second to complete five years in office after Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
Our covid response seems set to shift to a plan aimed at saving both lives and livelihoods. The economy must slowly open up now just to avert contraction this year.
Proceed carefully Over the weekend, Prime Minister Narendra Modi reportedly shifted India’s stance against covid-19 from life-before-worldly-living to life-and-worldly-living, even as signals from his meeting on Saturday with chief ministers suggested that India’s three-week lockdown, due to end on 14 April, will be extended in some form for another two weeks to arrest the spiral of infections.
The virus remains fearsome. Globally, covid claimed about 100,000 lives in a span of just 101 days, with half of them in just a week.