https://doi.org/10.1177/0275074020942411 American Review of Public Administration 2020, Vol. 50(6-7) 725–728 © The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0275074020942411 journals.sagepub.com/home/arp Lessons for Expanding Crisis Management Techniques & Pedagogy There is consensus among experts that India’s response to COVID-19 pandemic has been successful thus far (Sharma, 2020). India acted early and acted decisively. This is not an opinion but an evidence-based conclusion. The relative per- formance of three comparable countries is as follows (Table 1). The key to judging performance of a country in the war against COVID-19 is not related to the quality of talking points, messaging, public-relations, processes, and activities. All that matters in this business is lives saved. That is the bottom line and the only relevant success indicator in the short run. Testing and social distancing are only “means” toward the “end” of saving lives. That is, the purpose of test- ing and social distancing is also to ultimately reduce mortal- ity from this pandemic. By this criterion, as can be seen from Table 1, India has done exceptionally well. For sure, there were some real snafus on the way and they often looked quite distressing from a distance. It was, for example, painful to see migrants being huddled at exit points and being sprayed with a disinfectant. Optics were horrific (Abi-Habib & Yasir, 2020). Yet, that was a small cost for preventing deaths. Most experts believe that there was no time to set up a committee to figure out a less painful exodus without incurring fatal delays. Today, World Health Organization (WHO) and experts from other countries give high marks to India (“Coronavirus Pandemic,” 2020) for its timely response and strict implementation of lockdown and social distancing. The focus of this article is not to analyze India’s success in responding to this global pandemic, but rather, to draw les- sons from this experience for effective public management in other fields of development. As this pandemic has shown so dramatically, government plays an important role in deciding the destinies of the countries. That is why the competitive and comparative advantage of nations is determined by the effec- tiveness of their governments and not merely by resource endowment (Porter, 1990). A poor country like India, with its limited resources, is widely considered to have outperformed a resource-rich United States in this battle against coronavi- rus. In what follows, I list nine main lessons that we can learn for designing effective government systems to deal with other equally huge, though less obvious and dramatic, development challenges facing most countries. Lesson 1: Clarity of Goals and Objectives In this battle against coronavirus, the immediate objective was clear—how best to stop the spread of coronavirus and 942411ARP XX X 10.1177/0275074020942411The American Review of Public AdministrationTrivedi research-article 2020 1 Commonwealth Secretariat, London, UK Corresponding Author: Prajapati Trivedi, 1800 North Oak Street, Arlington, VA 22209, USA. Emails: p.trivedi@commonwealthconnect.org; Prajapati.trivedi@gmail.com India’s Response to Coronavirus Pandemic: Nine Lessons for Effective Public Management Prajapati Trivedi 1 Abstract COVID-19 pandemic has spared no country. Yet, the degree of infection and consequent deaths have differed vastly. There is, as yet, no scientific explanation based on climatic or genetic differences in populations. However, there seems to be an emerging consensus that public management matters. This article looks at three largest countries in the World and finds that outcomes in India, measured in terms of deaths from COVID-19 virus, are a fraction of deaths compared to other two large populous countries and appears to be an outlier. This article examines the public management response of a democratic government and draws lessons for effective public management in dealing with other grand public management challenges of our times. Keywords new public management, performance management, India, COVID-19, coronavirus pandemic, government performance management