During COVID-19, India's administrative machinery moved at speeds the same machinery cannot achieve in normal times. Personal Protective Equipment production scaled from near-zero to global export volumes within weeks, vaccines were developed and deployed across a billion-plus population, and inter-ministerial coordination compressed routinely-stalled processes into hours. The capability was demonstrated; the post-crisis tempo did not retain it. Why does the architecture revert when the crisis lifts?
Before COVID, India imported nearly all its Personal Protective Equipment kits. Within weeks of the national lockdown, textile manufacturers across the country retooled production lines. By mid-2020, India was not only self-sufficient but had become one of the world's largest exporters. Bureau of Indian Standards standards were fast-tracked. Import restrictions on raw materials were eased. Quality testing protocols were compressed without being abandoned. This was not deregulation; it was regulation operating at the speed the situation demanded, which raises the uncomfortable question of why that speed is not the default.
Indian generics manufacturers scaled Remdesivir production within weeks. The Serum Institute of India yielded over a billion doses of Covishield. Bharat Biotech developed Covaxin from isolate to emergency use authorisation in under a year. These were not miracles. They were outputs of an industrial base built over decades of pharmaceutical manufacturing policy. COVID revealed the capability. It did not create it.
Crisis begets opportunity, and COVID was the moment where India overcame and disrupted its own institutional and bureaucratic barriers with a decisiveness that peacetime governance has never replicated. The concurrence chain that typically adds months to every decision was compressed to hours. The inter-ministerial coordination that routinely stalls at the Joint Secretary level was elevated to the Cabinet Secretary and the Prime Minister's Office. Officers who would normally seek three layers of approval before acting were given institutional permission to decide. The system demonstrated that it knows how to move fast; it simply does not choose to in normal circumstances, because the incentive architecture penalises speed (which carries audit risk) and rewards deliberation (which distributes accountability).
The Empowered Group of Secretaries (EGoS) structure bypassed normal inter-ministerial hierarchies. Vaccine distribution through the COVID Vaccine Intelligence Network created a digital backbone for the largest vaccination programme in history. Vaccine Maitri shipped doses to over 100 countries. This was not merely humanitarian generosity. It was the demonstration of an industrial base capable of serving global demand under extreme stress.
The specific EGoS architecture that processed the COVID response deserves institutional examination beyond the generic bypass observation, because what was built then and what was retained since are different categories. At the height of the response, the Cabinet Secretariat constituted eleven Empowered Groups of Secretaries covering medical emergency management, hospital availability, essential commodity supply, PPE production, economic and welfare measures, information and communication, technology and data management, public grievances, coordination with states, private sector coordination, and NGO coordination. Each EGoS was chaired by a Secretary-ranked officer with a specific sectoral mandate, included Secretaries from concerned ministries, and was empowered to take operational decisions without routing through the standard concurrence architecture. The meetings were held daily or multiple times a week during the peak period; decisions were recorded and acted on the same day; and the institutional practice that emerged was effectively a compression of the routing, noting, and concurrence layers that had previously operated sequentially. What changed permanently was not the EGoS mechanism itself, which had existed as an instrument before COVID and continued to exist after, but the institutional familiarity with how EGoS could be used, the willingness of the Cabinet Secretariat to constitute them on shorter notice for specific matters, and the precedent that inter-ministerial coordination could operate at compressed tempo when the apex architecture was institutionally aligned. The Cabinet Secretary's office retained, as a learning, the specific sequencing through which decisions could be pre-worked across ministries before the EGoS convened, such that the meeting yielded decisions rather than further examinations. For reforms that followed COVID, the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme decisions during 2020-21, the Electronics Component Manufacturing Scheme (ECMS) approvals in 2025-26, and the Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India (SHANTI) drafting cycle in 2024-25 among them, the EGoS instrument has been used more frequently and more operationally than it was in the decade preceding. What did not change is the default tempo for matters that do not carry apex-level priority; those continue to operate on the standard concurrence architecture, and the EGoS instrument remains reserved for matters where the institutional alignment has been pre-composed at the PMO level.
What COVID demonstrated is that India's administrative machinery is capable of extraordinary coordination, speed, and scale when three conditions are met simultaneously: political will at the highest level removes inter-ministerial friction, regulatory agencies compress timelines without abandoning standards, and industry is given clear direction with minimal procedural ambiguity. The troubling insight is that these three conditions are treated as emergency exceptions rather than as an achievable operating standard. The same regulatory system that certified PPE in days takes months to clear a medical device import in normal times. The same cross-ministry coordination that allocated oxygen across states cannot synchronise EV charging infrastructure targets across three ministries in peacetime.
COVID proved that the machinery works. The question is why it only works at that speed when a crisis forces it to.