End week musings
On last three Saturdays, I wrote GST Pulse under the title ‘weekend musings’. It was an attempt to reflect over the week’s happenings - more from the non-business, non-commercial angle – sometimes sharing a poem or sharing my memories of my meeting with Dr Kalam. Today, I would reflect on all four weeks, that I had been writing this COVID-19 series, as this would be the last of the GST Pulse articles in the series.
It all started one Saturday evening, 4 April to be precise, when a friend asked me a simple question, “Why no economist is telling us how as a country or as an industry or as individuals we should face the COVID-19 situation?” Remember it was just a week after the lockdown. By then there were many articles in the media, which wrote about what could go wrong but did not tell us what we should or could do. We needed answers - then and there, and these articles failed to do so. It was then, that I decided I would give it a try as I talk to so many people from the industry every day. I have to simply compile these conversations, ideas, concerns and put them all together.
I wrote my first article on the following Monday i.e. 6 April. “Since time is short”, I wrote in my first article, “I shall write every day for next 2 weeks”. As the lockdown got extended, I continued to write for one more and further one more week. When I started, I really did not know what I was going to write about. In fact, every day when I would sit at my desk at 6am in the morning, I would not have the faintest idea of what I was to write. But the mere thought that I had made a commitment to almost 1500 of you would motivate me to write and refine that for next three hours. In any case these were ideas shared by you, which I was only stitching together into a small article.
As days passed, I could see some of the thoughts which we discussed here in GST Pulse being discussed in the media and even in corporate boardrooms. In the second article (7 April) we discussed that if we can work from home for 21 days why can't we work from home 21 days every month. After a week or so, some companies announced that they would extend ‘work from home’ to a large part of their employees, even after the lockdown.
In the 4th and the 5th article, we discussed how an organisation should plan its COVID-19 response. Many readers later told me that they used some of the tips in those articles when they were preparing their organisation’s response. And why would they not do that, as these ideas had come from someone like them, who was working in the industry.
While discussing the economic impact on India, we discussed that increasing taxation on petroleum products is one way of generating revenues for the Centre and the State especially as crude prices were going down. In the 17th article (24 April) we discussed that petroleum duties may go up and we may see new cesses coming up to increase revenues. Nagaland became the first state to impose COVID-19 cess on petroleum products four days later.
This is not to claim that there is something prophetic about GST Pulse. I only wanted to highlight that when we collectively think, we tend to think more in the right direction. What we need in these difficult times is more of sharing of thoughts and ideas. While GST Pulse may not come to you now on, we should continue sharing our thoughts among us, through whatever forum that is available.
Even as the lockdown is extended for another two weeks from 4 May, many activities will start in the green and orange zones and even in parts of red zones. The wheels of the economy will now start moving. Let us get ready to participate whole-heartedly in this exercise. But let us all be human while we do this, let us care for the needy and the less privileged, let us share others’ pain and share our benefits, let us help each other. In this war, we can only win ‘together’.
(Views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not reflect the views of KPMG in India.)