Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered one of his starkest warnings yet about the state of the global economy on Saturday, telling the Indian diaspora in the Netherlands that decades of hard-won progress against poverty stood at serious risk if the world's cascading crises were not urgently reversed.
"The world is dealing with new challenges," he said, speaking at a community event in The Hague during the second leg of his five-nation European tour.
In light of ongoing conflicts, particularly in the oil-rich West Asian region after the US and Israel's attacks on Iran, Modi described the present decade as a period of compounding catastrophe.
“First came the corona(virus) pandemic; then wars began to break out, and now there is an energy crisis. This decade is turning into a decade of disasters for the world,” he explained, speaking in Hindi.
He issued a pointed warning about the consequences of inaction. If these situations are not rapidly changed, he said, “achievements of the past many decades would be washed away, and a huge section of the world's population would be pushed back into poverty".
