Abstract

Chapter
First Online: 04 May 2022
Part of the Local and Urban Governance book series (LUG)

Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis has severely affected lives and livelihoods of the people in India. The most adversely impacted are the urban poor tied to the informal economy. Faced with livelihood vulnerabilities due to lockdown in major cities, millions of interstate migrant workers had returned to their rural roots. The way India’s governance apparatus has sought to mitigate the crisis varies from state to state. This chapter explores how variations in provincial-state level political cultures influence urban policy environment and administrative delivery mechanism of disaster relief through case studies of two states – Kerala and Odisha. The research shows that both states had been relatively successful in reducing transmission of the pandemic with methodically planned and timely interventions informed by prior disaster management experience, and had also adopted people-centric welfare-oriented policies to mitigate livelihood vulnerabilities. However, there are crucial differences in approaches towards operationalisation of the policies and roles of the key stakeholders in the process. This can be attributed to the differences in the political culture of the state within which the governance systems are rooted. Kerala exemplifies ‘pluralist’ governance, where the key decision makers are elected urban municipalities, while Odisha demonstrates ‘managerialist’ governance led by state appointed bureaucrats.

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Cite this chapter
Chatterji, T., Roy, S., Chatterjee, A. (2022). Sub-national Political Culture and COVID-19 Pandemic: Governance Response Towards Life and Livelihood Vulnerabilities of Urban Poor in India. In: Nunes Silva, C. (eds) Local Government and the COVID-19 Pandemic. Local and Urban Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91112-6_28

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