JumpStartIndia@ISB to support India’s post-COVID19 recovery and rehabilitation

Indian School of Business announces JumpStartIndia@ISB, a first-of-its-kind initiative that deploys faculty intellectual leadership and students’ experience to generate solutions to the most pressing challenges before the country on its road to COVID recovery. It is imperative that we all come together to identify smart solutions that minimize the trade-offs in the short-run and create a pathway to robust economic recovery in the medium term. Indian School of Business will bring its considerable intellectual resources to bear upon this challenge by deploying faculty-led teams of researchers and students working together over the next one year. We offer the resources and support from JumpStartIndia@ISB to public agencies in India to assist with rapid and robust economic recovery.

Professor Ashwini Chhatre, Professor of Public Policy and Director, Bharti Institute of Public Policy at ISB, explained that students and faculty will work together in key areas identified in consultation with experts as priority challenges where ISB’s expertise is strongest and most relevant. An important element of JumpStartIndia@ISB is the diverse experience and skills of incoming students at ISB. Coupled with their interest and motivation in contributing to JumpStartIndia@ISB, students will provide tremendous energy to the initiative and ensure its success, he added.

The challenges India faces requires us to put our best foot forward and bring ISB’s considerable intellectual resources to bear upon the task. ISB can act as a beacon for disparate individuals to step up and offer their contributions to be deployed in a structured manner towards solving pressing problems. At a time when ordinary citizens are keen to volunteer in assisting with economic recovery, ISB will provide a mechanism to harness this goodwill for finding solutions.

In order to catalyze feedback and generate proposals, the school has identified the following list of topics for initiating JumpStartIndia@ISB:

1. Food and Agriculture:Ensure food is produced, available, and accessible in sufficient quantities at all times for everyone.
2. Informal Economy: Identifying, alleviating, and preventing distress of workers through economic stimulus and welfare measures.
3. Boosting the Economy: Operational and policy interventions to restart economic activity in a phased manner.
4. Monitoring the Recovery: High-resolution indices of economic activity to monitor progress and take corrective actions.
5. Transportation, Logistics, and Mobility: Re-starting movement of goods and people, both passenger and freight, local and long-distance, across different modes of transport.
6. Healthcare: Sustained provision and minimal disruption of essential healthcare services across primary, secondary and tertiary care.
7. Institutionalizing Remote Work: Reimagining Jobs, Workspaces, HR Systems and Leadership.
8. Corporate Health Tracker:Indicators to monitor the pulse of India Inc and financial markets to help in corporate decision-making and policy interventions.

For more  information on JumpStartIndia@ISB, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O7bWs3jk_U&t=126s