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The authors present the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on community lifelines. The state machinery has several departments to secure essential lifelines during disasters and epidemics. Many countries have formed national disaster management authorities to deal with manmade and natural disasters. Typical lifelines include food, water, safety and security, continuity of services, medicines and healthcare equipment, gas, oil and electricity supplies, telecommunication services, transportation means and education system. Supply chain systems are often affected by disasters, which should have alternative sources and routes. Doctors, nurses and medics are front-line soldiers against diseases during pandemics.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how much we all are connected yet unprepared for natural disasters. Political leaders prioritize infrastructures, education but overlook the health sector. During the recent pandemic, developed countries faced more mortalities, fatalities and casualties than developing countries. This work surveys the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on health, energy, environment, industry, education and food supply lines.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused 7% reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions during global lockdowns. In addition, COVID-19 has affected social fabric, behaviors, cultures and official routines. Around 2.84 bn doses have been administrated, with approximately 806 m people (10.3% of the world population) are fully vaccinated around the world to date. Most developed vaccines are being evaluated for new variants like alpha, beta, gamma, epsilons and delta first detected in the UK, South Africa, Brazil, USA and India. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all sectors in society, yet this paper critically reviews the impact of COVID-19 on health and energy lifelines.

This paper critically reviews the health and energy lifelines during pandemic COVID-19 and explains how these essential services were interrupted.

This paper critically reviews the health and energy lifelines during pandemic COVID-19 and explains how these essential services were interrupted.

As we know that whole world is facing global pandemic or COVID-19 for past six months including India. It has created many psychosocial problems among the millions of people of the society. Committing suicide is one of them owing to COVID-19, and it is the matter of grave concern for the social psychologists. This study is based on secondary data. The purpose of this paper is to understand the nature of suicides in Indian society during COVID-19 and to explore the factors affecting committing suicides during COVID-19.

The secondary data have been collected for the study of suicide because of COVID-19 through various newspapers and monthly magazines. The cases of suicide because of COVID-19 have been collected between March 2020 and July 2020. The authors have used content analysis method to analyse the cases related to suicide because of COVID-19.

This study finds that the nature of committing suicide is anomic, egoistic and altruistic in the current pandemic. The study also points out that most of individuals have committed suicide in this current pandemic owing to fear of corona infection and economic crises because of nationwide lock down.

This is an original paper which is based on content analysis. Basically, the present paper has examined the nature of suicide in India because of COVID-19 and nationwide lockdown using Durkheim’s perspective of suicide.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic meltdown and social unrest severely challenged most countries, their societies, economies, organizations, and individual citizens. Focusing on both more and less successful country-specific initiatives to fight the pandemic and its multitude of related consequences, this chapter explores implications for leadership and effective action at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. As international management scholars and consultants, the authors document actions taken and their wide-ranging consequences in a diverse set of countries, including countries that have been more or less successful in fighting the pandemic, are geographically larger and smaller, are located in each region of the world, are economically advanced and economically developing, and that chose unique strategies versus strategies more similar to those of their neighbors. Cultural influences on leadership, strategy, and outcomes are described for 19 countries. Informed by a cross-cultural lens, the authors explore such urgent questions as: What is most important for leaders, scholars, and organizations to learn from critical, life-threatening, society-encompassing crises and grand challenges? How do leaders build and maintain trust? What types of communication are most effective at various stages of a crisis? How can we accelerate learning processes globally? How does cultural resilience emerge within rapidly changing environments of fear, shifting cultural norms, and profound challenges to core identity and meaning? This chapter invites readers and authors alike to learn from each other and to begin to discover novel and more successful approaches to tackling grand challenges. It is not definitive; we are all still learning.

The study provides medium-term estimates of recovery paths for Indian economy using a dynamic factor (DF)-based approach that employs data on high-frequency indicators à la Bhadury, Ghosh, and Kumar (2020). The DFs are used to analyze the post-pandemic recovery and convergence with its pre-COVID-19 trend for India between March 2021 and March 2022. A broad sectoral assessment of the impact of COVID-19 is also conducted. In addition, forward-looking measures based on stock returns are used to analyze the transmission of additional banking sector risks to the real sectors by constructing daily delta conditional value-at-risk (CoVaR) estimates. Our estimates based on the DFs suggest that the aggregate economic activities may catch up to the estimated pre-COVID trend by March 2021 predominantly driven by the growth in services sector. The industrial sector and consumer goods sector continue to show moderate signs of recovery. Our CoVaR estimates corroborate these findings. Banking sector transmission risk is among the lowest for services such as healthcare and information technology (IT), for both the lockdown period between March 25 and June 8, 2020, and for the latter months. The transmission risk continues to remain high for metal, oil and gas, and capital goods sector. Broadly, the evidence on forward-looking banking sector risk transmission for major sectors is in alignment with our finding on their recovery based on DF models, after easing of COVID-19 lockdown.

The COVID-19 outbreak has significant psychological effects because of reduced support system and social quarantine, making women the worst-hit population of shadow pandemic, i.e. domestic violence. While food shortages, unemployment and increased domestic-work burdens are the immediate effects of the lockdown, women at home have to bear its far-reaching impacts in the long term in the form of domestic abuse, making the study of the psychological impact of domestic violence against women imperative. This paper aims to identify the factors and causes responsible for domestic violence and its psychological impacts on women in different aspects. This paper further focuses on the reasons behind an escalation in psychological violence against women.

This paper is based on extrapolating data from various journal articles, Indian Government reports, newspaper articles and other printed materials that are recent, relevant and discuss domestic violence and mental stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers use Indian National Commission for Women’s (NCW) data on complaints received regarding violence against women and domestic abuse in the year 2020 and 15 journal articles that discuss domestic violence against women during the COVID-19 period in different countries to discuss social inequalities and power relations impact on women’ mental health.

The findings suggest that economic instability during the pandemic and social and cultural norms of India ignited psychological abuse against women during the pandemic. The number of monthly complaints of dowry death, dowry harassment and protection of women against domestic violence reflect on increased registered complaints in the postlockdown period in the year 2020. The number of monthly complaints received by the NCW from January 2020 to December 2020 in India represents that WhatsApp chat is a powerful tool for reporting domestic violence.

The pandemic lockdown has an adverse psychological impact on women, making them suffer from posttraumatic symptoms, substance abuse, panic attacks, depressions, hallucinations, eating disorders, self-harm, etc. This paper strives to reflect upon mitigation strategies to curb domestic violence in India.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected around 216 countries and territories worldwide and more than 2000 cities in India, alone. The smart cities mission (SCM) in India started in 2015 and 100 smart cities were selected to be initiated with a total project cost of INR 2031.72 billion. Smart city strategies play an important role in implementing the measures adopted by the government such as the issuance of social distancing regulations and other COVID-19 mitigation strategies. However, there is no research reported on the role of smart cities strategies in managing the COVID-19 outbreak in developing countries.

This paper aims to address the research gap in smart cities, technology and healthcare management through a review of the literature and primary data collected using semi-structured interviews.

Each city is unique and has different challenges, the study revealed six key findings on how smart cities in India managed the COVID-19 outbreak. They used: Integrated Command and Control Centres, Artificial Intelligence and Innovative Application-based Solutions, Smart Waste Management Solutions, Smart Healthcare Management, Smart Data Management and Smart Surveillance.

This paper contributes to informing policymakers of key lessons learnt from the management of COVID-19 in developing countries like India from a smart cities’ perspective. This paper draws on the six Cs for the implications directed to leaders and decision-makers to rethink and act on COVID-19. The six Cs are: Crisis management leadership, Credible communication, Collaboration, Creative governance, Capturing knowledge and Capacity building.

The lives of the poor in the urban spaces of India are filled with hardships. They live amidst poverty and struggle to survive within other problems such as insecure jobs, lack of proper housing, unsanitary conditions and low levels of health immunity. This vulnerable section of the population has been rendered furthermore vulnerable by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in ways that were never imagined before. Taking this into consideration, the purpose of this article is to examine the vulnerability of the poor in the urban settings of India with special reference to Mumbai in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The methodology adopted in the study is based on the analysis of secondary data and content analysis of the existing literature. In addition to this, the study also makes use of certain narratives of the urban poor in Mumbai that have been captured by various articles, reports and blogs.

The findings of the study reveal how the urban poor of India, with special reference to Mumbai, the financial capital of India, has emerged as the worst sufferers of the socioeconomic crisis caused by the social distancing and lockdown measures imposed for combating the pandemic.

The study tries to explore the reality of the urban poor's right to the city in the wake of the pandemic.

The purpose of the study is to understand what impact the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 had on the income and food security of rural households in India and whether it differed across socioeconomic factors. Moreover, the study assesses the needs of rural households and determines whether they had received adequate support services during the lockdown.

The study adopted a repeated-measures quantitative survey design with 1,319 rural women from 16 states of India and conducted a telephonic survey.

The lockdown had directly impacted rural households' employment status and income but the impact differed depending on the type of employment. For example, working in a salaried job or on one's farm led to a lower likelihood of a complete decline in income in states other than Kerala as the lockdown continued. The study also revealed a change in the pattern of food consumption, with higher consumption of subsidized staple foods. It also became evident that the aid announced by the government reached the rural population with some delay.

A limitation of the study was that many respondents refused to participate in phase 2, which reduced the sample size when comparing the two phases because the women did not own mobile phones. Instead, they were using their husbands' phones.

The study's findings can help better understand the needs of rural populations during crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This can help to plan better and build preventive actions for such populations once their needs are understood. In addition, this can aid disadvantaged people for a minimal level of preparedness and security during such a crisis in the future.

In this chapter, we examine how the media in India constructed the lives, needs, and desires of disabled children in India during the tumultuous pandemic.

Through critical discourse analysis, we address how children's bodies and needs have been explicitly discursively constructed as “excessive,” while implicitly drawing upon neoliberal, ableist logics of loss and productivity.

We foreground how the framing of COVID-19 as a disaster in the Indian context obscures state neglect, suggesting that inequality has been the result of the pandemic rather than the limits of state care under neoliberal ableism. Despite the recognition of gaps in the care received by disabled children, neoliberal, entrepreneurial solutions have emerged as a new, widely touted form of care during the pandemic.

Through our analysis, we highlight how disabled children have been neglected by the state and constructed as burdensome and vulnerable. We argue that this occurs when disabled children's bodyminds do not conform to an ideal of the self-reliant, independent citizen under the logics of neoliberal ableism. Our work demonstrates how children with disabilities are discursively rendered absent from conceptualizations of normate citizenship, unless seen as contributing to current or future aspirations for state productivity and growth.

Contemporary arguments around efficient public management (PM) envisage a limited role of the state for efficiency, effectiveness and austerity. On the contrary, the PM of the Covid-19 pandemic shows the significant role and depth of administrative state in multi-faceted ways. In this context, the purpose of this article is to examine the administrative role of the Indian state and the extent of its “stateness” in the PM of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

This article is a bifocal study of both the national and a single sub-national case. Following mixed qualitative methods, this article draws on government documents, interviews and recent media reports to examine the reemergence of a strong administrative state in India in the context of PM of the pandemic. This methodology allows us to go deep into the cases and provide a robust understanding of the underlying processes within the state that throw open some compelling insights on the PM of the pandemic.

This article shows the reemergence of a strong administrative state in multiple ways. It demonstrates that state’s administrative capacity is an outcome of both ideas within the state and its rationality that shapes policy strategies and planning. Further, a combination of learning, puzzling and powering plays a critical role in pandemic management. Exploring pandemic-induced state capacity in India sheds light on the administrative state’s emergence, extent and function in an emerging developing country setting.

One of the major challenges of this study is the evolving nature of the pandemic. In this light, the study limits its focus to the earliest stage of the pandemic. Revisiting this paper in future would provide a more comprehensive picture. Furthermore, the study is limited to the national and a single sub-national case. This research will gain from including more sub-national and cross-country comparisons to test some of the conjectures presented in this paper.

This article shows that the state as a conceptual variable needs to be taken seriously to understand and explain the PM strategy, especially in times of crisis. It also persuades us to better understand the political power of “ideas” within the state to explain policy outcomes and evolving PM strategies.

This article seeks to push the frontiers of research on state capacity and PM by exploring how social learning and puzzling come together to consolidate policy paradigms. Through the lens of PM of the current Covid-19 pandemic by the Indian state, this article reflects on the reemergence of the administrative state. It examines the long-term ramifications of such a revival for both practice and theory of state capacity and PM in a large, diverse democracy, such as India.