Jean-Luc Racine, senior researcher at Asia Centre, will be part of a panel at a conference organised by Asialyst and Inalco.
The conference will take place on Wednesday 20th of October at 18:30 in the auditorium of the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Inalco), 65 rue des Grands Moulins, 75013 Paris. To register and attend face-to-face or remotely, it’s here.
It was in January 2021, during the Davos Forum: Narendra Modi, Indian Prime Minister, proclaimed his country’s victory over Covid-19. The pandemic was under control and India was to come to the aid of the rest of the world by providing it with massive amounts of vaccines. And yet, three months later, the country was hit hard by another devastating wave causing hundreds of thousands of deaths. The country that saw itself as the “pharmacy of the world” was reduced to asking for help to obtain oxygen cylinders…
Carelessness of the public authorities which had authorised electoral meetings and giant pilgrimages, neglect of health institutions which had not foreseen the impact of the second wave on a failing health system, ineffectiveness of public action undermined by rivalries between the government’s central and federated states, the Covid-19 crisis has in fact acted as a formidable indicator of the country’s structural flaws.
This conference will attempt to analyse the various components of the impact of the health crisis on the second most populous country on the planet. How to understand this failing governance during this humanitarian disaster? What does this crisis reveal about the functioning of Indian federalism? How to analyse the bankruptcy of the health system?