“The industry has been scrambling to set up its own business continuity plan,” said R. Chandrashekhar, a retired federal government official and a former president of India’s IT services lobby group, NASSCOM.

“The fair value of a quality stock doesn’t change due to a few quarters of earnings downgrades,” said Saibal Ghosh, chief investment officer at Aegon Life Insurance. “At such attractive valuations, this is where we would like to bet our money,” he said.

“We estimate that the cumulative shutdown cost around USD120 billion or 4 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP),” British brokerage Barclays said in a note, revising down its FY21 growth forecast by 1.7 percentage points to 3.5 per cent.

It specified the cost of the three-week nationwide lockdown to be alone at USD 90 billion, which is over and above the lockdowns announced by various states like Maharashtra earlier.