In The Making of a Catastrophe, PERI researcher Jayati Ghosh describes how the COVID-19 pandemic has been the worst health calamity in India for at least a century and, in particular, how the central government’s “very specific policy failures—acts of both commission and omission—were responsible for the widespread and pronounced decline in people’s livelihoods …and caused major setbacks to the development project of the country.” Ghosh documents how the central government “did next to nothing to ensure basic protection for the hundreds of millions of people who were denied income for several months.”