India’s Covid-19 catastrophe could make global shortages even worse

A terrifying and record-breaking wave of Covid-19 in India threatens to stall the country’s economic recovery and send shockwaves through several important global industries.

Asia’s third largest economy has been struggling for weeks to control the devastating surge. Hundreds of thousands of new cases are reported every day, and economists are rethinking their forecasts for double-digit growth this year — a troubling sign for a country that plunged into recession last year for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century after the government imposed a nationwide lockdown.