State-Level Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic in India

Health After 2020 dialogue sessions are held as part of the Health After 2020 program at UBC Health, which enables researchers to engage in interdisciplinary, cross-institutional collaborations that aim to create change in health and health producing systems. These collaborations respond to the broad effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and further our understanding of the determinants and experience of health and wellbeing.

India has been strongly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond the vast direct and indirect health impacts, there have major societal and economic disruptions across the country, particularly during the devastating second wave from April to June 2021. Given India’s political structure, understanding and comparing the ways in which state governments responded and performed during the pandemic will provide important insights into multi-sectoral decision-making and governance. Such research could elucidate key learnings for states and the union government in order to improve the response to future health emergencies, as well as strengthening the health system more broadly.

This interactive dialogue session will present the results of a comparative research project on state-level responses to COVID-19 in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra and put them into a global context. Researchers from UBC and India will share findings on the role of institutions, organizations, governance, and politics in state government responses to COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021. The research team will engage participants in a discussion about how these findings relate to global conversations on strengthening public health systems and decision-making for future emergencies.

Speakers
– Veena Sriram, Assistant Professor, School of Population and Public Health, Faculty of Medicine and School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, Faculty of Arts, UBC
– Peter Berman, Professor, School of Population and Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, UBC
– Girija Vaidyanathan, Researcher, Indian Institute of Technology Madras
– Sarthak Gaurav, Associate Professor, Economics, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay

This dialogue session is co-presented by UBC Health and the Centre for India and South Asia Research.