Taking stock of the vaccine rollout

Almost a month since the start of India’s vaccination drive, it appears highly unlikely that the government will meet its target of inoculating 300m people by August. For now, we maintain our assumption that it will take much longer to vaccinate the most vulnerable – perhaps 12-18 months. But these are still early days. Increased willingness among the public, more funding for the rollout and greater vaccine availability would all allow the pace of vaccination to accelerate: if that happened to a significant degree, we’d be inclined to revise up our GDP forecasts for 2021 and 2022.