Fact Check: No, Raghuram Rajan did not hold webinar for IMF on economic crisis
By Satya Priya BN
With more than 20 lakh people infected worldwide and 1.27 lakh dead, the COVID-19 pandemic is creating a havoc worldwide. Lockdowns seem to be the only way to slow its spread. However, due to these lockdowns, economies of major countries are collapsing.
Recently, a post is going viral on various social media platforms that include a series of points that are claimed to be the key takeaways from a webinar hosted by IMF (International Monetary Fund) on April 20, 2020, chaired by Indian economist, Raghuram Rajan. It is a long post that includes various economic insights about how India should take business decisions to avoid economic crisis during the pandemic.
This was published on a website named founder.com also.
This claim is shared on Twitter too.
Fact check:
The above claim is false.
When we checked the IMF website, we found that there have been no recent webinars which featured Raghuram Rajan.
https://www.imf.org/external/mmedia/index.aspx
When we searched using the keywords IMF webinar Raghuram Rajan, we found that Businesstoday.in published a report on April 21, 2020 stating that former Reserve Bank of India governor had refuted the claims that he had chaired a IMF webinar session. It also states that he has rejected these claims as fake news in a post on his Linkedin account.
On his Linkedin account, Raghuram Rajan posted, "A webinar, purportedly from an IMF session that I am supposed to have chaired, is circulating among Indian WhatsApp groups. I have not participated in any such webinar. I am afraid in this age of fake news it is hard to respond to every such occurrence. I can only say that I post all my relevant public statements on this site only."
Hence, the points mentioned in the claim are not from a webinar by Raghuram Rajan in IMF. The above claim shared virally is FALSE.
