India's quiet crisis of competence is now showing up in its public-health file

Three separate Indian Express editorials this week — on pandemic preparedness, a forensic collapse in an air-crash probe, and the demolition of slum dwellings — point to a state that is losing the routine business of governing.

By Monexus Staff Writerasia5-minute read11 Jun 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

Indian editorial pages rarely shout. They tend to make their case in the measured, slightly weary register of a country that has been governing itself, more or less continuously, since 1947. So when the same paper runs three sharply worded pieces in a single day — on pandemic preparedness, on the air crash that has come to symbolise a forensic collapse, and on the political choreography of slum demolitions — it is worth paying attention to what the pattern is actually saying.

The thread that runs through them is not a failure of ambition. India is still investing heavily in research, in primary care expansion, in disaster response architecture. The thread is a failure of routine. A state that cannot conduct a dignified divorce, cannot preserve a crash site long enough to read the black boxes properly, and cannot demolish an unauthorised settlement without the opposition leader writing to the chief minister to demand an inquiry is a state that has lost the intermediate skills of governing — the unglamorous, day-to-day work that no manifesto ever brags about.

From Hantavirus to Ebola, and the gap in between

The first piece, an editorial on pandemic preparedness, makes the obvious point that the country's surveillance net is still calibrated for the last outbreak, not the next one. Hantavirus, Ebola, Nipah, the novel coronaviruses that keep emerging out of zoonotic reservoirs across South and Southeast Asia — each of these requires a different diagnostic reflex, a different chain of custody from district hospital to national reference laboratory, and a different relationship with the World Health Organization. India has the laboratory capacity. What the editorial argues it lacks is the connective tissue: the trained district epidemiologists, the standardised data formats, the political willingness to declare an outbreak early enough for it to be contained. The point is not that India is uniquely bad at this. The point is that the country has been told, repeatedly, since 2014 and again since 2020, what the gap looks like, and has filled perhaps a third of it.

An air crash, and the friendship that should not have had to exist

The second piece is the most affecting. It concerns the friendship that has emerged in the aftermath of an Air India tragedy between families of passengers on opposite sides of the India-Pakistan border — a bond that should not have had to be forged through a single shared disaster, and that says something uncomfortable about the diplomatic ceiling the two states have imposed on ordinary people. The editorial's larger argument is that the investigation itself has been compromised: that the crash site was not preserved with the rigor a 21st-century forensic inquiry demands, and that the families — Indian and Pakistani alike — are now doing the work of memory that institutions were supposed to do. A modern aviation probe takes months, not weeks, and the interim answers that have been issued do not inspire confidence that the final report will be allowed to say what the evidence says.

The shanties, and the SMC's silence

The third piece is the most procedural, and therefore in some ways the most damning. The Leader of the Opposition has written to the chief minister to say that it is "not possible to believe" that a fresh wave of shanties was razed without the Srinagar Municipal Corporation's knowledge. In other words, a routine act of urban governance — the clearance of unauthorised encroachments — is now being contested at the level of a chief minister's correspondence file, because the municipal body's own accountability mechanisms have been bypassed or have atrophied. The same pattern, in miniature, appears in city after city: demolitions proceed, the paperwork trails behind, the affected residents have no forum in which to be heard, and the opposition performs the function that a functioning municipal complaints system should perform as a matter of course.

What the pattern adds up to

Read together, the three editorials describe a state that is still capable of large projects — a space programme, a digital public infrastructure stack, a defence indigenisation drive — but is increasingly unable to do the small things well. Pandemic surveillance is a small thing until it isn't. A crash site investigation is a small thing until 270 people are dead. A municipal clearance is a small thing until the homes of several hundred families are gone. The structural problem is not corruption, in the crude sense the word usually carries. It is the steady erosion of the boring, mid-level institutional capacity that converts policy on paper into service on the ground. The Indian state has, over the last decade, recruited aggressively at the top — more Indian Administrative Service officers in policy roles in Delhi, more technocrats in line ministries — and has underinvested, year after year, in the district and municipal cadres who actually run the country.

The counter-reading, which the government would offer and which is not without merit, is that India is a federation of enormous complexity, that any comparison with smaller and more homogenous systems is unfair, and that the editorial pages of The Indian Express, by long tradition, read like a counsel of permanent disappointment. There is something to that. But the air crash, the pandemic gap, and the shanties are not editorial abstractions. They are the kinds of failures that, taken one at a time, a serious country absorbs; taken together, they begin to look like the leading edge of something larger.

What remains uncertain

It is worth saying plainly what the available record does not settle. The Indian Express editorials express a view; they are not an audit. We do not have, from these three pieces, an independent forensic assessment of the Air India crash, a peer-reviewed evaluation of India's pandemic surveillance architecture, or a judicial finding on the Srinagar demolitions. The honest reading is that a serious newspaper has signalled, in three adjacent pieces, that the routine business of governance is no longer routine — and that the next test will not be a moonshot, but a monsoon, a ward, or a runway.

This piece was filed against a single-source thread of Indian Express editorial coverage. Monexus treats the editorial board of The Indian Express as a tier-one source on Indian institutional drift; the wire services have not yet matched the diagnosis.