Risks and resilience: COVID-19 response and disaster management policies in India

ABSTRACT Disasters and crisis are becoming more complex with deadly cascading effects. The current coronavirus pandemic is viewed as the newest form of health and socio-economic crisis that has disrupted the flow of normal life for millions. Viewing the pandemic as a unique or unpredictable occurrence shifts responsibility and accountability from a host of institutional actors to those who were unable to protect themselves from the direct and indirect effects of the pandemic and incurred heavy losses. Situating the pandemic within the well-established policy debates around disasters enables us to understand how the novel coronavirus rapidly transformed into a humanitarian crisis in India. Successful disaster risk reduction involves the creation of a “culture of resilience” but resilience thinking has been criticized as lacking in “moral compass”, showing a poor understanding of power relations and as governance that emphasizes individual responsibility. Chronically poor people can be “resilient” at the expense of their long-term wellbeing. Drawing on the moral, political and philosophical debates about the shift toward “resilience” in global disaster policy, this article examines the rhetoric of “self-reliance” to address COVID-19 dislocation. We find that disaster policies that rely mainly on resilience and compliance increase state power while absolving them of responsibility.