Make-in-India: Moving from a Monocentric to a Polycentric response to the COVID-19 crisis!

Abstract

The paper will look at the initial and subsequent Indian government’s response to the COVID-19 focusing event. The strategy used to tackle the initial Covid-19 wave in India was copied from resource-rich countries and authoritarian countries and due to centralization bias in India’s institutions, a monocentric response to the crisis was the default instead of cooperative solutions. However, the response to the pandemic should have been by multiple decision centers and based on local and institutional knowledge, considering India’s institutions, culture, and state capacity, for a “Make-in-India” polycentric response. Solving large-scale health externalities requires coproduction to deal with nested externalities more effectively instead of monocentric global responses. I propose policy considering previous epidemic responses focusing on polycentric governance where civil society is incentivized.