Covid-19 in India: what the health crisis reveals about Narendra Modi's country

Wednesday, October 20 at 6:30pm at the Inalco auditorium, 65 rue des Grands Moulins, 75013 Paris.
The debate will also be broadcast live on YouTube.
Registration required to attend the conference in person.
We'll send you the link to access the conference via YouTube once the capacity has been reached.

It was January 2021, at the Davos Forum: Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, was proclaiming his country's victory over Covid-19. The pandemic was under control, and India would come to the rescue of the rest of the world with a massive supply of vaccines. And yet, three months later, the country was hit full force by a new wave of devastation, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. The country that saw itself as the "pharmacy of the world" was reduced to asking for help in obtaining oxygen cylinders...

Insouciance on the part of public authorities who had authorized election rallies and giant pilgrimages, carelessness on the part of health institutions who had not foreseen the impact of the second wave on a failing health system, inefficiency of public action undermined by rivalries between the central government and the federated states, the Covid-19 crisis in fact acted as a formidable revealer of the country's structural flaws.

This conference will attempt to analyze the various components of the impact of the health crisis on the world's second most populous country. How can we understand the governance failures associated with this humanitarian disaster? What does this crisis reveal about the functioning of Indian-style federalism? How can we analyze the bankruptcy of the healthcare system?

With :

• Anne Viguier, historian, India specialist, lecturer at Inalco and researcher at the Centre d'études en sciences sociales sur les mondes américains, africains et asiatiques
• Jean-Luc Racine, director of research emeritus at the CNRS and senior researcher at Asia Centre
• Yves-Marie Rault Chodankar, geographer, specialist in the Indian pharmaceutical industry, postdoctoral fellow at the Centre Population et Développement (Ceped) and the Institut Francilien Recherche Innovation Société (IFRIS)

Moderation:

• Patrick de Jacquelot, journalist at Asialyst and former Les Echos correspondent in India

Co-organizers: Inalco and Asialyst.com, the news and analysis website for Asia
Contact : contact@asialyst.com