this story originally appeared in on oct 29 2020new delhi prime minister narendra modi believes india can still achieve 5 trillion economy target by 2024 despite covid19 in his first interview after the outbreak of the pandemic to pranab dhal samanta and bodhisatva ganguli the pm says his reforms drive will continue but states must also compete to attract investmentq its been seven months since india launched its fight against coronavirus through the first lockdown in march whats your assessment on how we have faredi am sure we all agree that this virus is something unknown nothing like what has happened earlier in the past so while tackling this new unknown enemy our response also evolves i am no health expert but my assessment is based on numbers i think we should assess our coronavirus fight against the metric of how many lives we are able to savethe virus is proving to be very fickle at one time some places like gujarat were seen as hot spots while the situation seemed to be under control in kerala karnataka etc after a few months things have improved in gujarat but turning for the worse in keralathis is why i feel there is no room for complacency i stressed the same in my recent message to the nation on october 20 that the only way forward is to take precautions such as wearing mask hand washing and social distancing because jab tak dawai nahin tab tak dhilai nahinq but has it broadly panned out the way you expected or have you had to improvise and innovate constantlywe decided to be proactive and introduce a timely nationwide lockdown when we introduced a lockdown the total number of cases was in a few hundreds unlike many countries that adopted a lockdown when the cases were in the thousands we imposed lockdown at a very critical point in the pandemic trajectorywe not only got the broad timing of various phases of lockdown right we also got the unlock process right and much of our economy is also coming back on track the data for august and september indicates that india has taken a sciencedriven approach in response to covid19 pandemic in the country such an approach proved beneficialstudies now show that this response helped avoiding a situation which could have led to rapid spread of the virus with many more deaths in addition to the timely lockdown india was among the first countries to mandate wearing of masks use a contacttracing app and deploy rapid antigen testsfor a pandemic of this dimension it would not have been possible to manage if the country was not united the entire country stood together to fight this virus the covid warriors who are our frontline healthcare workers knowing well the threat to their life fought for this countryq whats your biggest learningone positive learning in the past few months has been the significance of delivery mechanisms that reach the last mile much of this delivery mechanism was built