The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly impacted the global economy, society, and politics, raising critical questions about existing policy discourses and priorities. The pandemic not only resulted in a significant death toll but also exacerbated unemployment, social conflict, and disruptions in education. These effects were felt worldwide, regardless of income status or growth rates, and have had lasting impacts on socio-economic conditions, many of which are irreversible.

The extensive loss of life and livelihoods has highlighted serious gaps in state preparedness for external shocks, underlining the urgent need for fundamental restructuring of public policies in the post-COVID-19 era. This unprecedented crisis has sparked a vital policy debate on shifting priorities from focusing exclusively on economic growth to enhancing social sector development.  Additionally, it has reinvigorated discussions about the public sector’s role in providing essential  goods and services.

The sudden outbreak and its devastating impact of the Covid 19 pandemic raised the most pertinent question about the level of preparedness for any unforeseen circumstances leading to natural disasters. Recently, India has seen several natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis and COVID-19. Given their enormous impact on many people’s lives, it is imperative to critically explore the country’s level of preparedness in mitigating and recovering from such high-impact natural disasters. Dr Vasantha Gouri, in her article ‘Handling Natural Disasters and Resilience Building: A Study in South Asia’, sheds some light on such challenges in the country.

The COVID-19 outbreak and its disastrous impact have indicated the country has inadequate healthcare infrastructure to deal with such unforeseen crises, particularly concerning access for the large populations living at the margin. More precisely, marginalised social categories, including women, have remained the biggest victims of the sudden outbreak and limited preparedness of the healthcare system in India. Haritha Surap and Dr. Ravinder Kaur, in their jointly authored article ‘Influence of Socio-Economic and Cultural Factors on Women’s Health in India: An Overview’, elaborately discuss some of these concerns.

Education also remained one of the most crucial sectors bearing the brunt of the COVID-19 lockdown. One of the special impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the change in the mode of teaching from offline to online, particularly for school children. Such shifting of the teaching mode in the country certainly has enormous socioeconomic implications in countries like India, where internet penetration is extremely low. It seems evident that education quality is not only under question in the online mode of education, but its highly regressive nature has had more long-term implications for the socially and economically marginal sections of the population. In his article titled ‘The Government of India Initiatives for Online Education during COVID-19: An Observation and Experiences’, Dr. Arvind Kumar Yadav covers some of these aspects in detail.

Further, due to the lockdown and the destruction of a large section of the informal means of livelihood, the impact on food security of the masses, in general, was put under severe stress. In this context, one needs to evaluate the role of the Public Distribution System in ensuring food security in the country. ‘Agrarian Crisis in India, Food Security and MSP’ by Dr Trishna Sarkar addresses some of these concerns profoundly. One of the country’s major challenges in addressing such infrastructural bottlenecks is primarily due to inadequate resources. In a country like India, where resources are not abundant, the proper utilisation and assessment of output and income becomes unavoidable. Creating infrastructure to address such unforeseen situations needs an assessment of the country’s potential output. Measuring the potential and existing output gap is paramount to formulating policies to bridge the gap. The mobilisation of resources in their fullest capacity could perhaps be the best way to improve the country’s preparedness for addressing natural disasters and challenges of policy in this regard. Some of these points are addressed in the article ‘Estimation of Output gap- Exploring different methodologies’ by Arushi Joshi.

A top-down approach was one of the most significant criticisms of India’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. In fact, the impact of the COVID-19-led policy responses formulated and implemented from the top profoundly affected different regions of the country in different ways. Therefore, in academic discourse, both formulations and implementations of policies at the decentralized levels are highly appreciated. However, in India, the decentralized level of government has its challenges. Rupak Biswas, in his article ‘Barriers to Grassroots Democracy: Examining the Impediments of People’s Participation in the Governance of Gram Panchayats in Tripura, with Policy Insights’, explains some of such limitations and suggests a few relevant measures to make decentralized governance more effective.

In this context, the special issue on public policy explores some of the critical aspects of recent public policy challenges in India. It covers a wide range of articles addressing the challenges of public policy on issues such as health, education, the economy, natural disasters, effective functioning of local governance and food security in the country.

Issue Editors
Prof. (Dr.) Avanindra Nath Thakur
Professor, Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, O.P. Jindal Global (Institution of
Eminence Deemed to Be University), Sonipat, Haryana, India.
Dr Saurabh Chandra
Assistant Professor – Public Administration, Assam Don Bosco University, Guwahati, India.