2020, A Year Of Reforms During The Unprecedented Coronavirus Crisis 2020, A Year Of Reforms During The Unprecedented Coronavirus Crisis Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government used the Covid-19 pandemic as an opportunity to drive wide-ranging reforms. Updated: December 16, 2020 6:47 pm IST It is a fact of economic policy-making in India that bold reforms only take place during difficult moments rather than in ideal conditions. "It is said India reforms only in crisis," former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan wrote once. In 1991, the economic liberalisation drive by then Finance Minister Dr Manmohan Singh and then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao unleashed the latent animal spirits in the economy. Many economists say those developments would not have taken place without the debilitating balance-of-payment crisis at the time. Even the Atal Bihari Vajpayee administration's strategic sales of state-run companies such as ITDC and VSNL came at a time when the country was reeling under severe US sanctions, following the 1998 nuclear tests. India has once again lived up to reputation of using a crisis to reform itself.