An extended lockdown was vital to rein in the Covid-19 outbreak but the government is trying to restore normalcy within the constraints, minister for road transport, highways and MSMEs Nitin Gadkari told Nishtha Saluja and Deepshikha Sikarwar in an interview. The minister said he has suggested providing low-cost capital to MSMEs through NBFCs and called for speedy payment of their outstanding dues. He expressed the hope that with economic activity resuming, workers will stay put and not go back to their villages. Edited excerpts:<\/p>\n
Do you think the lockdown has stretched too long and will have big economic consequences?
\nWe do not have any other option. We need to fight coronavirus. You have to compare with what is happening in the US, UK, France and Germany. India\u2019s situation is still under control. There is lockdown, but at the same time some relaxations have been given. All national highways are now open and are witnessing 65-70% traffic flow. All our ports are functional. Now industry has also started working. There are issues only in red zones. There is no contradiction. This war is very important and at the same time, we need to fight our economic war. Day by day, we are helping normalise things with relaxations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An extended lockdown was vital to rein in the Covid-19 outbreak but the government is trying to restore normalcy within the constraints, minister for road transport, highways and MSMEs Nitin Gadkari told Nishtha Saluja and Deepshikha Sikarwar in an interview. The minister said he has suggested providing low-cost capital to MSMEs through NBFCs and called for speedy payment of their outstanding dues. He expressed the hope that with economic activity resuming, workers will stay put and not go back to their villages. Edited excerpts: Do you think the lockdown has stretched too long and will have big economic consequences? We […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[130,193,136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-349405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newspapers","category-roads-the-economic-times","category-the-economic-times"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}