rupalimukherjeetimesgroupcomamong business leaders biocon executive chairperson kiran mazumdarshaw is perhaps uniquely positioned to comment on covid19 as shes recently recovered from the virus herself and her firm is in the thick of things to get solutions for it she firmly believes what is required is the removal of regulatory cholesterol that is impeding business efficiency and increasing cost of doing businesshow far has your business returned to normalwe have ramped up from 50 in april to 90 in august what challenges has the new normal posed and any major learningsbeing an essential industry we have critical operational functions that cant be done remotely any employee testing positive disrupts activity we have therefore zoned all our campuses so that we contain any outbreak to the zone and not disrupt the entire campus moreover we have initiated a calibrated and aggressive testing to ensure the campus is covid19 free what are you doing to ensure worklife balancea rotation between work from home and onsite working is proving to be very effective in providing worklife balance more importantly we have introduced online yoga exercises and even cooking classes should the government go for a much bigger public investment programmedemand for our drugs has not reduced however there is a huge slump in demand for consumer goods auto real estate tourism etc until normalcy returns it will be difficult to spur demand augmenting business ease can incentivise more investment and employmenthow do you think the government has handled the covid pandemic and what more is neededmultiple forms of testing need to be developed as a model to assess disease burden and predict outbreaks and evaluate safe zones in addition we are not systematically triaging patients between home quarantine and hospitalisation we should prevent overwhelming our hospitals rapid antigen testing and pooled rtpcr as well as rapid antibody testing are useful in largescale testing which must be conducted every two weeks in congested areas to prevent large outbreaks contact tracing has slackened and we cant afford to let this happen masking ought to be a civil society effort goa is a great example of a wellcontrolled safe state