HEALTH DIPLOMACY: BUILDING RESILIENT INSTITUTIONS TO COMBAT HEALTHCARE CRISIS

In this pandemic ridden world, to cope with circumstances eff ectively or speedily, what we lacked the most is global health diplomacy. Almost every country, including India, did not feel a need for health diplomacy as equally relevant and indispensable as defence diplomacy. In the wake of this, this article highlights the urgent need for the world to focus more on health diplomacy with calibrated eff orts to sustain economies.

- DEEPANSHI GUPTA

With the recent pandemic of COVID-19, in this pandemic-ridden world, to cope with circumstances eff ectively or speedily, what we lacked the most is global health diplomacy. Almost every country, including India, did not feel a need for health diplomacy as equally relevant and indispensable as defence diplomacy. In the wake of this, this article highlights the urgent need for the world to focus more on health diplomacy with calibrated efforts to sustain economies.

With the recent pandemic of COVID-19, it has become essential that we think about building resilient and strong healthcare institutions to improve global healthcare governance. Resilient health institutions are required not only in India but all over the world and that is where the importance of global health governance comes. Such institutions need to come into existence within an international order of global governance as the current pandemic clearly shows that our responses to health issues cannot just be domestic matters. Raisina Dialogue in January 2020 was evidence of how there is a dearth of health issues being taken seriously in global governance. It showed that IR scholars and policymakers engage in global economics and security issues but don’t give much importance to transnational aspects of health.

Institutions are made resilient by adopting eff ective and efficient policy decisions. Firstly, global governance needs to take into account health diplomacy. Indian health diplomacy during emergencies has to be far more than sharing a disease control model with other nations. More accountability is needed from the World Health Organisation (WHO) for its guidelines.