Tackling Challenges of COVID-19: An Assessment of the Convergence- Divergence Debates from the Global South-India

The World Health Organization (WHO) officially announced COVID-19 as a global pandemic in March 2020 which in effect transformed the society, economy, the politics and indeed our everyday life. Such a transformation of power geometries across all manner of spaces and their geographies disrupted the finite balance and wellbeing and continues to displace norms of equanimity, sanity, and hope amidst the catalogue of errors, blunders and inactivity. In India the first COVID-19 case was registered on January 30, 2020. The response of 29 States and 7 Union Territories of India has varied depending on their health, community, law and order and legislative infrastructure. This chapter will attempt to situate an analysis of coronavirus pandemic within the demographic transition framework of India. We examine the critical role of civil societies across the states, divergence of policies and practices relating to social distancing, contact tracing, and differential Public Health Agency infrastructures in operation across the States of India. What began as a stigma, followed by populist rhetoric quickly faded into intense struggle for survival even as oxygen, essential medicines and of course hospital beds became a premium in the most affluent parts of any given city. The grim reaper became a great leveller cutting across socially constructed boundaries of class, gender, age, caste and religion. The management of this pandemic and the established protocols for treatment remain tentative even as we learn lessons from yet another mutant strain. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Governance response during COVID-19 and political affirmative action: evidence from local governments in India. (Special Issue: Local governments in pandemic response.)

A great deal of work argues that the entry of women into public spaces can promote political and institutional change. The COVID-19 provides an opportunity to investigate whether and under what conditions women's political representation in rural local governments deliver effective local governance? Drawing from two rounds of data collected in 174 local governments and 1051 households in three Indian states, the paper shows that women Pradhans in the Gram Panchayats had no differential impact on the governance response to COVID-19 compared to the unreserved ones. Analyzing the heterogeneity in these responses suggests that institutional factors like the proportion of women in village council and local entrepreneurship diversity can enhance women Pradhan's capacity to respond to the pandemic. We explore two channels that enable women Pradhan to govern effectively during the pandemic: improving women's participation in the labor force and reducing household's vulnerability to poverty in the pre-COVID period.

The local governance of COVID-19: Disease prevention and social security in rural India.

Countries around the world have undertaken a wide range of strategies to halt the spread of COVID-19 and control the economic fallout left in its wake. Rural areas of developing countries pose particular difficulties for developing and implementing effective responses owing to underdeveloped health infrastructure, uneven state capacity for infection control, and endemic poverty. This paper makes the case for the critical role of local governance in coordinating pandemic response by examining how state authorities are attempting to bridge the gap between the need for rapid, vigorous response to the pandemic and local realities in three Indian states - Rajasthan, Odisha, and Kerala. Through a combination of interviews with mid and low-level bureaucrats and a review of policy documents, we show how the urgency of COVID-19 response has galvanized new kinds of cross-sectoral and multi-scalar interaction between administrative units involved in coordinating responses, as local governments have assumed central responsibility in the implementation of disease control and social security mechanisms. Evidence from Kerala in particular suggests that the state's long term investment in democratic local government and arrangements for incorporating women within grassroots state functions (through its Kudumbashree program) has built a high degree of public trust and cooperation with state actors, while local authorities embrace an ethic of care in the implementation of state responses. These observations, from the early months of the pandemic in South Asia, can serve as a foundation for future studies of how existing institutional arrangements and their histories pattern the long-term success of disease control and livelihood support as the pandemic proceeds. Governance, we argue, will be as important to understanding the trajectory of COVID-19 impacts and recovery as biology, demography, and economy.