From pandemic to perennial crisis: adapting COVID-19 crisis governance frameworks for socio-hydrological resilience in India

What does a handwashing campaign look like when millions of households have no running water? That question, deceptively simple but structurally devastating, sits at the centre of this paper. When COVID-19 arrived in India in early 2020, public health authorities recommended hand hygiene as the most accessible line of defence available. For a significant share of India’s population, that recommendation landed in a context where water itself was the problem. Taps ran dry. Handpumps required queuing. Tanker-dependent slum households faced a cruel geometry: the act of collecting water brought exactly the crowding that prevention was meant to avoid. This paper does not dwell there merely to document the irony. It asks something more forward-looking: given what India’s pandemic governance response revealed about what this state can do when it decides to act, the surveillance architectures built at speed, the command structures stood up in days, the community health workers mobilised at village scale, what might that demonstration mean for water governance? The two crises are not symmetrical. One is acute and loud; the other is slow, distributed, and politically convenient to leave unaddressed. Drawing on policy analysis, programme documentation from the Jal Jeevan Mission, and institutional mapping of pandemic-era governance innovations, this paper develops a Pandemic-Informed Water Governance (PIWG) framework built around five pillars: integrated real-time water surveillance, federated adaptive management, community co-production, equity-centred risk communication, and contingent finance. The framework is grounded in the theoretical tradition of socio-hydrological resilience and is proposed as a starting point for institutional design rather than a finished prescription.