Nobel laureate and founder of Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus, said that the Covid-19 pandemic has abruptly stopped the machanism of the economy. In a conversation with former Congress president Rahul Gandhi, he said that the pandemic revealed the weaknesses of the society.

Yunus said that the Covid-19 has given the world a chance to reflect on how big and bold decisions must be taken. “In normal situations, we will not pay attention to all these items. We are so busy making money. So I said coronavirus gave us a respite, and we now have a choice to the terrible world which is going to destroy itself anyway, or to head someplace else which can build a new world where they will be no global warming, no wealth concentration, no unemployment, it is possible,” said the noted economist.

‘Wealth has only one direction’

He added that only billionaires are growing in India. “You know where numbers of billionaires are growing and very strange in a country like Bangladesh or India have high growth rate of billionaires in numbers. So that means that wealth has only one direction and grows fast if you can use all the political understanding among the people that we can get together. It disappears because of the anger it generates,” he said.

Gandhi said people need to think about our traditional structures. “Now, of course, we’ve had a journey but I think the idea of rethinking some of these designs based on an Indian structure, a Bangladeshi structure and Asian structure would be quite a powerful thing. So I agree with you that the game needs to be equalised for rural people and Covid-19 gives us an opportunity to have a brand-new imagination which is which comes from within us as opposed to from outside us,” the Wayanad MP said.