Remdisivir, favirpiravir, ivermectin - nearly two months after these drugs first began to be used in treatment for covid-19 around the world, they are still not available in India. An alphabet soup of government institutions can't figure out how to get supplies moving.
The main reason is 'turf wars'. Each silo in govt insists that its role is vital, and that it cannot be rushed into doing anything, or that it is unwilling to be held responsible for bad outcomes. We have a situation where almost anyone can say 'no' while no one can say 'yes'.
This can only be cracked by leadership and coordination, but this is difficult now because our political class has always depended on the bureaucracy to do this, since very few elected reps are able to. That means, however, that when babus are reluctant/unsure, nothing can move.
Decades after the end of the Soviet Union, we have the world's largest central-planning state. Even China, where political authority is concentrated, does not have this level of administrative centralisation - city mayors there have power and budgets to do plenty of things.
Even worse, most of our centralised planning is actually centralised non-planning. There aren't that many people in higher offices in government who can coherently explain what their departments are doing, and defend their choices based on data and reasoning. It's all ad hoc.
