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Red Volunteers in West Bengal: Lessons for Public Leadership in a Pandemic

Document Cited in Related
Published date01 March 2024
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/00195561231204901
AuthorPratip Chattopadhyay
Date01 March 2024
Red Volunteers in
West Bengal: Lessons
for Public Leadership
in a Pandemic
Pratip Chattopadhyay1
Abstract
Pandemic COVID-19 has transformed our understanding of established notions
of leadership and management for tackling emergency situations where the pub-
lic themselves becomes the cause and bears the effect of it. This study on Red
Volunteers in West Bengal provides a ready example of how public manage-
ment can be created at the local level (neighbourhood/para) to tackle the spread
and veracity of a pandemic. The success of Red Volunteers lies on three pillars:
(a) reflecting discontent with government initiatives due to corruption, nepotism
and red-tapism, (b) presence of the youth which instils hope and confidence,
and (c) factual happenings of service distribution at the ground level. The article
concludes by arguing that the future public leadership for the pandemic must
arise voluntarily taking into account its context and culture. The experience
of a pandemic reflects that leadership must emerge from the society with a
new grammar of management, namely, distributing services and goods tuned to
sudden requirements of the public.
Keywords
Public, management, pandemic, West Bengal, Red Volunteers
Introduction
Public leadership is an important sub-field in the domain of public administration
which focuses on managerial skills of leaders (as individual self) at the level of
society. From the perspective of public administration, leadership is seen in
three forms—political, civic and service delivery (Hart, 2014). Public leadership
Article
Indian Journal of Public
Administration
70(1) 96–107, 2024
© 2023 IIPA
Article reuse guidelines:
in.sagepub.com/journals-permissions-india
DOI: 10.1177/00195561231204901
journals.sagepub.com/home/ipa
1 Department of Political Science, University of Kalyani, Nadia, West Bengal, India
Corresponding author:
Pratip Chattopadhyay, Department of Political Science, University of Kalyani, Kalyani, Nadia,
West Bengal 741235, India.
E-mail: chatterjee23_pratip@yahoo.co.in

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