It was around this time six years ago that Indians were given just four hours’ notice before a rigid 21-day, nationwide lockdown to combat the spread of COVID-19. Several countries, including the U.K., New Zealand, Sweden, have since held formal inquiries into their pandemic responses. In India’s case, no such inquiry has taken place, but a body of writing has accumulated, something like an unofficial reckoning.
Three books, arriving across five years, are worth reading together: Dr. Chandrakant Lahariya, Gagandeep Kang, and Randeep Guleria’s Till We Win: India’s Fight Against the COVID-19 Pandemic (Penguin Random House), Jyoti Mukul’s The Great Shutdown: A Story of Two Indian Summers (HarperCollins), and Jyoti Yadav’s Faith and Fury: COVID Dispatches from India’s Hinterland (Westland). Together, these cover the clinical, the systemic, and the human.
Logistical failures
The lockdown’s most immediate consequence was the disruption of transport. Mukul, a former journalist-turned-policy analyst, argues that the snapping of transport links was not a side effect of the pandemic response, but its most defining feature. The Indian Railways suspended all its daily passenger services with no plan for the millions already in transit. The Shramik Specials, when they finally ran weeks later, charged a fare till political pressure mounted. People who could not wait walked.
