Hardeep Singh Puri's Full Address At Republic Summit 2021

Nov 26,2021

Acknowledging that the novel coronavirus pandemic was a class apart, Union Minister for Housing and Urban Affairs and Petroleum and Natural Gas Hardeep Singh Puri said that the history of this period will be written as "pre-covid" and "post-covid". He said that the story of Aatmanirbharata (being self-reliant) started during the COVID-19. "When the pandemic hit us in 2019, some of us were not coming to terms with it, even the WHO. I used the word pandemic in an event in February 2019, and it was underlined that even the WHO has not declared it a pandemic yet," Hardeep Singh Puri said adding, "Back then, we opted for life and went into a complete lockdown. We literally had to ensure that the healthcare system was rebuilt to deal with the pandemic." He said that the crisis in 2008 and the crisis in 2019 were fundamentally different. "I served in Geneva and New York, in the UN & WHO. We'd dealt with other health crises, but COVID-19 was in its own class," Puri said. To contain the pandemic, he said that India went into a complete lockdown. "I was a civil aviation minister then, we flew in 1500 tons of medical supplies, we sent 940 tons of medical supplies within the country."