Looking into the continuing costs of India’s COVID-19 policy

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.

Yadav’s reportage follows individual lives over years. Five years in the making, thousands of kilometres across Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, it tracks people such as the teenager Jyoti Kumari, who cycled 1,200 kilometres with her injured father (now deceased) during the lockdown. She is still unable to enrol in college.

The same logistical failures that stranded passengers also broke the oxygen supply chain. Mukul documents the second COVID-19 wave with particular precision: beds, ICU capacity, and ventilators all fell between September 2020 and January 2021, when the government declared victory, by between 30% and 46%. The Pressure Swing Adsorption oxygen plants recommended for all major hospitals numbered 38 installed, against a target of 500 when the second wave peaked.

The science of it

Lahariya, Kang, and Guleria, three medical practitioners at the centre of India’s pandemic response, arrived in the thick of events. Their account, published in November 2020, notes the policy’s public health logic. Dedicated to ASHA workers and oriented around community health infrastructure, the book keeps the clinic and the field hospital in view.

On the science, the insider account is honest. They narrate the hydroxychloroquine arc, from global excitement to systematic disproof, without defensiveness. Their final call for Universal Health Coverage and expanded community participation reads differently now than it did in spring 2021. The second wave made every gap the authors identified more visible. What was a call to action became, in retrospect, a forecast.

Problem of counting

At the centre of the pandemic was a problem of counting. In 2025, the Office of the Registrar General confirmed that India recorded 1.02 crore registered deaths in 2021, a disproportionate 25.9% increase from the previous year. Yadav had been tracing this issue for five years — not through statistics, but through cremation ground registers she coaxed out of a Lucknow municipal staffer, documenting 101 cremations on a day the State claimed only 14 COVID-19 deaths. She also visited villages where families buried their dead in the fields because the neighbourhood feared contagion.

She embeds herself so deeply in individual lives that the numbers arrive as the culmination of a face and a name. There is Kalyani Agrahari, an eight-months pregnant schoolteacher who applied in writing for exemption from panchayat poll duty, was threatened with an FIR, spent 12 hours on duty, and died two days before her third wedding anniversary. Her widower Deepak appears in the book’s final pages, training to become a peon because the compensation he was promised never came.

Yadav also writes, with some candour, about being a woman journalist on those roads; no hotels, no toilets, an episode of harassment she insists on reporting to a sceptical Station House Officer. This is not a personal aside. It is part of a broader argument that ground reporters were neither protected nor counted as frontline workers, and that some 500 of them died doing the work that produced much of what we now know.

The uncounted dead, the uncounted workers, the uncounted journalists — the pattern holds across all three books. Mukul’s transport data; Lahariya, Kang, and Guleria’s clinical framework; and Yadav’s years of follow-up all converge on the same point: the Indian state’s capacity to not count what it does not wish to acknowledge.

The pandemic failed to become a poll issue. Yadav notes that people in villages remembered it as divine intervention, not state failure. This muted response is perhaps the most significant finding across all three books, more significant than the oxygen numbers or the excess mortality data now in the public domain.

Six years on, the question these works collectively pose is not whether the pandemic response succeeded or failed; the evidence on that is substantial. It is whether those who bear the costs of policy failure have been taken seriously enough. That question remains open and might not be answered.

(Vignesh Karthik K.R. is a postdoctoral research affiliate of Indian and Indonesian politics at KITLV-Leiden and research affiliate at King’s India Institute, King’s College London)

Published – April 01, 2026 08:00 am IST