Paper short abstract:

Covid-19 pandemic outbreak in India was very well managed in India with a lesser loss of life and prevalence of the virus than was anticipated and predicted due to the unpredictable nature of the virus and the response of a majority of public that has low level of education, poor health systems, loss of income due to isolation and lockdown. This is examined from Capability Approach perspective.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents a study of the public policy designed and implemented to manage the Covid-19 pandemic in India. The data comes from an analysis of a mainstream English newspaper’s Delhi edition, which is the capital city of India. It is also where the central government is based and could implement the policy strongly because of its control over the Delhi police. The analysis is being carried out in NVivo 14 and Python 3.12. Preliminary analysis shows that the achievement of better health capability outcomes was possible with a lower percentage of loss of life compared to the total population of India, versus the populations of some developed countries, by a) controlling the health agency and individual agency through state or governmental actors, b) the agency of health professionals in public sector, and the mandates to private health sector with some freedom given to them to plan their Covid strategy, c) the agency and paternalistic control of the police force with absolute power to implement the guidelines issued by Ministry of Home Affairs, and the Disaster Management Act of India, 2005. It is argued in this paper that health freedom and health functioning or health agency can be properly utilized as a freedom by an individual when it relates to their personal health concerns, needs and priorities. But in the face of a pandemic, governmental control, monitoring, action and control of individual agency led to better health capability outcomes and strengthening of healthcare sector, both public and private and with private public partnerships, there was lesser loss of life and spread of the pandemic in India. This analysis seems to contradict the conceptualization of health capability in the literature (Ruger, 2010).