Travelling the ‘last mile’ first: learning from a spontaneous intervention on the COVID-19 pandemic and socio-economic determinants of its impact in India

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a major social crisis in India as millions of migrant workers had to return to their home villages, without income, food and fearful of the police. Yet to overcome the spread of the virus, the vaccination programmes had to reach these ‘last mile’ communities too, often neglected as hard to reach, and stigmatised for their poverty and perceived resistance to engage with government administrations. The COLLECT initiative built a network of around 75 community-led organisations (CLOs) and 560 community fellows to monitor access for local hamlets to government support. The research conducted for this chapter demonstrates that after some initial success in engaging India’s poor in vaccination programmes, government programmes fell back into a top-down and market-driven approach which resulted in renewed disengagement by poor communities, feeling that they were again left to cope with a dismissive, undemocratic system built on long-established patterns of discrimination.