Two, the State needs to work with industry to rapidly develop and manufacture diagnostic tests, personal protection equipment, medications and ventil… - Devesh Kapur

Responses cannot be one-size-fits-all and will need to be tailored to local needs. Agriculture is a state subject and states and district administrators should have flexibility and be encouraged to be innovative and not punished for thinking out of the box.

At the same time, given India’s population density, the cramped and squalid conditions in which tens of millions people live, not only will social distancing have limited effectiveness (household members of every infected person will be at high risk), but the loss of livelihoods and access to will impose significant human costs. The short-term tradeoff between lives and livelihoods is manifest and nobody really knows where the precise balance lies. Too limited a lockout period risks the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands of people; too restrictive a lockout could result in the eruption of serious .

Three, the government needs to leverage the credibility and trust enjoyed by many civil society organisations to get essential services to vulnerable populations who the state cannot reach easily, such as migrants, older people or people with disabilities.