Abstract
India has a prolonged history of dealing with widespread epidemics and pandemics. It has enjoyed a commendable performance in controlling epidemics like polio, smallpox, and cholera, through sustained and effective health communication campaigns. Most of the campaigns and epidemic management had to be carried out in view of its diverse populations and contextualise tailor-made health messages. As a result, the epidemic management stretched over prolonged periods until the disease was contained. COVID-19 threw up a different challenge for pandemic management and called for re-strategised health communication, highlighting the interplay of the social determinants of health and other extraneous factors, which are completely outside the realm of health. Multiple discourses in the political, economic, psychosocial domains have made the Indian experience an interesting case study. This chapter aims to present some facets of public health communication during the pandemic and attempts to elucidate the interlinkages of health communication with other factors that influence social determinants of health, which during a pandemic necessitated strategic shifts in economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms, social policies, and political systems.
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Notes
- 1.
See https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/india (accessed 12 April 2021).
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Gavaravarapu, S.M., Vemula, R.K. (2021). Underpinnings of Pandemic Communication in India: The Curious Case of COVID-19. In: Lewis, M., Govender, E., Holland, K. (eds) Communicating COVID-19. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79735-5_10
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