Authors: Tarun Sharma, Nimisha Samadhiya & Dr. Mukul Asher

Our chapter in Asian Development Bank Institute’s Book on “Rethinking Cities for Resilience and Growth in the Post-COVID-19 World” .

Through the centuries, epidemics and pandemics have had a lasting impact on the social, political, and economic growth of societies (Huremović 2019). The coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which feels like a once-in-a-century pandemic, has had such an impact. It has been challenging national and subnational capacities and is shaping our social, economic, and political needs again.

COVID-19 is caused by a new coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2; WHO 2021). The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of COVID-19 a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January 2020 and later recognized the spread as a pandemic on 11 March 2020, calling countries to take immediate steps to reduce further transmission (WHO 2020).

In response to the pandemic, India made wide-scale public, economic, food security, and policy reforms. Many of these responses were at the level of the cities. This chapter analyzes the COVID response strategies through an overall SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis based on responses of all the cities