India and the Pandemic: The First Year, Essays from The India Forum
Contents: Introduction/Faizi Ahmad, C. J. Kuncheria and C. Rammanohar Reddy. Section I—Early Stages of Covid-19 in India: 1. Covid-19 in India: The Chronicle of a Pandemic Foretold/Thomas Abraham. 2. Coping with the Coronavirus Pandemic: Are Indians Safe?/K. Sujatha Rao. Section II—Dealing with Pandemics in India’s History: 3. Covid-19 and the Spectres of Colonialism/Pratik Chakrabarti. 4. Manufacturing Epidemics: Pathogens, Poverty and Public Health Crises in India/Sheetal Chhabria. 5. ‘The Government Will Come to Its Senses’: Calcutta’s Workers and the Plague of 1898/Prerna Agarwal. 6. Past and Present: Can India Beat Corona the Way it Beat Smallpox?/Harish Naraindas. Section III—Covid-19: The Initial Impact: 7. India's Tryst with Covid-19/Vikram Patel. 8. The Twin Crises of Covid-19 and How to Resolve Them/Ananda Lal Roy and Maitreesh Ghatak. Section IV—The Law, the Judiciary and Covid-19: 9. Exodus Constitutionalism: Mass Migration in Covid-19 Lockdown Times/Upendra Baxi. 10. Gendering the Pandemic in the Prison/Pratiksha Baxi and Navsharan Singh. 11. Migrant Workers, the Lockdown and the Judiciary/Harsh Mander. Section V—The Lockdown and After: 12. India’s Lockdown/Debraj Ray, S. Subramanian and Lore Vandewalle. 13. Hunger Grows as India’s Lockdown Kills Jobs: Results of a Survey from 12 States/Rahul Lahoti, Amit Basole, Rosa Abraham, Surbhi Kesar and Paaritosh Nath. 14. How Many Casual Workers in the Cities Have Sought To Go Home?/Nomaan Majid. 15. The Gig Economy in the Pandemic: Outsourcing Risk, Privatising Gain?/Gayatri Nair. Section VI—Impact on the Economy: 16. Understanding India’s Economic Slowdown: Need for Concerted Action/R. Nagaraj. 17. The Unequal Effects of the Covid-19 Crisis on the Labour Market/Radhicka Kapoor.18. States’ Loss of Fiscal Autonomy in a Centralised Federal System/M. Govinda Rao. 19. Knowns and Unknowns in the Covid-19–triggered Global Economic Crisis/C. P. Chandrasekhar. Section VII—Impact on Society: 20. Psychosocial Challenges in the Midst of the Coronavirus/Honey Oberoi Vahali. 21. A Novel Virus, a New Racial Slur/Naorem Pushparani Chanu and Gorky Chakraborty. Section VIII—The Future: 22. Extreme Events in Nature: An Ecological History of the Present/Ramprasad Sengupta. 23. Four Future Scenarios, or What’s Different about the Covid-19 Crisis?/Itty Abraham. 24. Seven Lessons for the Future: For the World after Covid-19/Prem Chandavarkar.
In the past year, the novel coronavirus Covid-19 has affected every single part of the world. Over 1.5 million people have died; the global economy has contracted the deepest since the Second World War; and the gains over the decades in poverty eradication may have been erased. Amidst this, how did India fare in coping with Covid-19 in 2020?
India and the Pandemic? looks back at the historical, social, cultural, economic and political aspects of the Covid-19 outbreak in the country. The 24 essays in this volume, written by astute political and social commentators, offer rich insights into the impact of the pandemic, and the response of state and society. The essays tell us what we should have done early on, and what we should have done differently in dealing with this health and humanitarian disaster. They place the current pandemic within the broader history of infectious diseases. They provide valuable lessons for the future, telling us how we should think of organising human society differently if we are to prevent future pandemics.
Written in 2020, these incisive essays offer a real-time window into the spread of the novel coronavirus disease in India. They make for a thought-provoking read for anyone interested in what happened during the first year of the pandemic.
