Describe the role of science and technology in enabling us to face the challenges triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. (2021)
The pandemic was the first global emergency met in real time by a networked scientific system. Within a year of the virus’s genome being published in January 2020, societies possessed vaccines, genomic surveillance and a digital substitute for much of ordinary life. What technology enabled is undeniable; what it could not equalise is the sociological remainder.
The biomedical response
- Vaccines: Covishield and the indigenously developed Covaxin, produced by Bharat Biotech with the Indian Council of Medical Research and the National Institute of Virology, received emergency approval in January 2021. Over 220 crore doses were administered through the CoWIN platform, and more than 23 crore doses were supplied to close to a hundred countries under Vaccine Maitri.
- Genomic surveillance: the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium, launched on 30 December 2020 by the Department of Biotechnology with the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and the health ministry, allowed variants to be identified and tracked — knowledge converted directly into policy.
Reorganising the delivery of services
- Telemedicine was legalised by practice guidelines issued in March 2020, removing a regulatory barrier overnight. The public platform eSanjeevani has since delivered more than 43 crore consultations, extending specialist advice well beyond the metros.
- Digital public infrastructure kept exchange and welfare moving: unified payments carried record volumes, exceeding 24 billion transactions in a single month by 2026, while portable ration entitlements let migrants draw food grain outside their home state.
- Work and schooling shifted onto platforms within weeks, sustaining administration, courts, banking and higher education, while contact-tracing applications and dashboards made an invisible epidemic legible to citizens and to the state.
The inequality attached to each capability
- Vaccination ran ahead in cities and among the literate, because registration itself initially demanded a smartphone and digital confidence.
- Teleconsultation presupposes a device, a signal, and the ability to describe symptoms to a stranger without examination.
- Schooling exposed the sharpest gap: the 75th round of the national sample survey found computers in only 4.4 per cent of rural households against 23.4 per cent of urban, and internet access in 14.9 against 42.0 per cent. Pippa Norris‘s distinction between the global, social and democratic divides maps the outcome precisely.
- Remote work was a privilege of the salaried; for casual and migrant labour no technology substituted for physical presence, and the exodus of 2020 was the visible proof.
- Robert K. Merton‘s Matthew effect — advantage accumulating to the already advantaged — describes the pattern across all four.
This is not simple technological determinism. What made the instruments work was organisation — regulatory approval, cold chains, panchayat-level mobilisation and a mass public health bureaucracy. Technology supplied capability; institutions supplied delivery.
Conclusion
Science converted a biological catastrophe into an administratively manageable one, and that is a real achievement of organised human capacity. But capability is not the same as access: technology set the ceiling of the response while social stratification set the floor. The lesson is that public health systems and digital inclusion are the conditions under which scientific capability becomes a public good rather than a private advantage.