Pandemic covid-19 and rural economy of india

COVID-19 is a popular term to the present day world. It has got attention of the entire world due to its deadly character. Our day to day life has been totally disrupted due to the outbreak of COVID-19. We have become bound to stay at home. Industries, transportation, hotel, restaurant, offices, schools, colleges, universities, domestic house- keeping, shops –all are closed due to the announcement of lockdown. Even at the phase of unlock many of them could not be in their pre-COVID position due to extreme fare of being infected. Rural economy of India has been suffering a lot. Livelihood of a considerable proportion of rural people of India has been experiencing a miserable condition during this crisis period. Since the recent past many vocational courses have been advocated for the benefit of growing educated unemployed people. Here also we find the training of sharing the available opportunities. There does not exist any attempt to create further employment opportunities. Rather an effort is being made to hide the failure of creating employment opportunities. It is hard to believe that the proponents of vocational courses are unable to foresee the possibility that these institutes providing education of vocational courses would suffer from dearth of students in near future. Why do they deceive then? In the era of Globalization the only idea that has occupied our mind is that we should go for producing those commodities, which are enjoying competitive advantage in the global market. It is never taken into consideration that Regional Economic Development may act as engine of acquiring comparative advantage over the others. Nowhere it is recognized that either an existing activity or to be explored activities based on available resources even in remote rural areas may acquire competitive advantage in the world market if they are taken care of. Now time has come to consider this possibility to make India self-reliant through the implementation of decentralized planning. Section-I of this present paper seeks to analyze the state of rural sector of the economy before the outbreak of Covid-19. Section-II deals with the effects of COVID-19 on various spheres of rural economy of India. Section-III incorporates measures or steps that can mitigate the problems during this pandemic period as well as in post-COVID era and finally Section-IV includes conclusion.