When I see pictures of India now, with thousands of people dying every day and crowds

desperate to get vaccinated, I keep thinking back to this moment in January.

First, allow me to congratulate you on your handling of the pandemic and launching the biggest vaccine drive in the world.

This guy is a Swedish executive, and he's congratulating Narendra Modi, India's Prime Minister,

on what seemed at the time like a victory against COVID.

Modi was speaking in Hindi to international thinker types at the World Economic Forum in Davos, which was held online.

He told the crowd that India, quote, succeeded in saving the lives of the maximum number of its citizens.

When Modi was talking at Davos, I think a number of Indians would have looked at what he said or heard what he said and felt that he was sort of broadly right.

That's Samantz, Subramanian, a journalist with courts.

That, you know, on the evidence of the past year, or the past nine months, India had done, relatively speaking, better than many advanced Western countries

with much better healthcare systems.

But the plan, as it was laid out in Davos,

wasn't just to sit back and enjoy India's apparent COVID successes.

Vaccines were coming online,

and India would undertake the world's largest ever

vaccine drive. If India had a massive challenge on its hands, 1.3 billion people needing

2.6 billion doses, it also had a huge advantage over everyone else, the Serum Institute of India.

The Serum Institute, or S-I-I, is the world's largest vaccine manufacturer.

And it's not an exaggeration to say that it has helped vaccinate people in more than 100 countries.

And that was the plan for COVID, too.

I feel like it's impossible to underline enough how much SIA ended up in the position as India's and almost the Global South's

vaccination hope. How did it end up in that position? It was always destined to happen.

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