219 - Braving a Viral Storm | Aashish Chandorkar | Suraj Sudhir | Policy

Jan 16 2023 • 1 hr 15 mins

Aashish Chandorkar works as counsellor at the Permanent Mission of India to the World Trade Organization in Geneva. He is a lateral entrant to the government, having spent more than two decades in the management consulting and financial services industries working around the world. He has been writing on public policy in the domestic and international media for several years.

Suraj Sudhir works in the field of computer systems and machine learning in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. He has maintained an avid interest in modern global and Indian economic history, with a particular focus on understanding the quantitative underpinnings of development. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he tracked and wrote extensively about the progress of the Indian vaccination effort

In this episode we talk to them about India's fight against a raging pandemic and how policies, the government and the public came together in a time of crisis.

Buy Braving a Viral Storm here: https://www.amazon.in/BRAVING-VIRAL-STORM-Covid-19-Vaccine/dp/9355209746

Topics:
00:00 Sneak Peak
01:00 Introduction
02:32 How Aashish came to write the book
06:22 Challenges and constraints in vaccine development
09:30 Early days of the vaccine drive
15:12 Learnings from previous vaccination efforts
18:28 Traditional vaccines v/s mRNA vaccines
21:35 Importance of having an indigenous vaccine
25:24 Strategy behind Vaccine procurment
35:30 Challenges in Vaccine Administration
40:09 India & the US' contrast in approach towards vaccine drives
46:40 What went right?
52:17 Role of Public digital infrastructure
54:42 What did the naysayers miss?
58:39 Benefits of Vaccine Maitri
01:01:24 Leadership lessons from the vaccine drive
01:06:57 Key Personalities in the vaccine drive
01:12:01 Aashish and Suraj's most memorable moment while writing the book