Prime Minister was delivering the virtual keynote address at the inaugural function of Grand Challenges Annual Meeting (GCAM) 2020 yesterday evening.

He remarked India is now at the forefront of vaccine development for COVID. He announced more than 30 indigenous vaccines are being developed in our country and three of them are in an advanced stage.

He said India is already working on putting a well-established Vaccine delivery system in place and this digitised network along with digital health ID will be used to ensure immunisation of our citizens. He pointed that India is known for its proven capacity to produce quality medicines and vaccines at low cost.

More than 60 percent of the Vaccines for Global Immunisation are being manufactured in India. He said with India’s experience and research talent, India will be at the centre of global healthcare efforts and desires to help other nations enhance their capacities in these sectors.

He ha further added that this global pandemic has made us realise the importance of teamwork. He said the diseases do not have geographic boundaries and do not discriminate on the grounds of faith, race, gender or colour. He added these diseases also include several communicable and non-communicable diseases that are impacting people. He said a strong & vibrant scientific community and good scientific institutions in India have been India’s greatest assets, especially during the last few months, while fighting COVID-19. He added they have achieved wonders from containment to capacity building.

The Prime Minister said COVID-19 death rate in India is very low in spite of the large population due to the people powered and people driven approach. He added today, there is a decline in the number of cases per day, decline in the growth rate of cases and has one of the highest recovery rates of 88 per cent. He said this happened because India: was one of the first countries to adopt a flexible lockdown, was one of the first to encourage the usage of masks, actively began to work on effective contact-tracing and was one of the earliest to deploy the rapid antigen tests.

He has urged to keep using the collaborative spirit for individual empowerment and collective well-being. He wished for fruitful and productive deliberations and hoped to see many exciting and encouraging new solutions coming out from this Grand Challenges platform.