“…Much of the literature concerned with understanding the health aspects of COVID‐19 has focused on the number of deaths (Chatterjee, 2020; Chatterjee et al., 2020), the impact of India's vaccination campaign (Bagcchi, 2021; Potdar et al., 2021), and COVID‐19 transmission dynamics (Samui et al., 2020; Shil et al., 2022; Ghosh et al., 2021). Other recent literature has recognized that during wave one, and in its the aftermath, challenges were emerging, some sowing the seeds for long‐term damage—for example, women losing their jobs and not returning to work (Azim Premji University, 2021), domestic violence increasing and so setting back the gender equality agenda for decades (Agarwal, 2021; Steinert et al., 2023), mental health declining (Narayanan & Sriram, 2023; Panda et al., 2023), closures of a large number of micro, small, and medium enterprises (Chen et al., 2023), loss of jobs especially among informal sector workers (Kumar & Kumar, 2021; Dev & Sengupta, 2020), among other issues.…”