The People's Commission & Public Inquiry Committee
The People's Commission & Public Inquiry Committee
We are a people-led process of inquiry into what happened during and after the pandemic, what changed, and what it has meant for people. Especially for those from historically oppressed communities.
The People’s Commission & Public Inquiry Committee (PC-PIC) began in response to COVID-19 and the draconian measures used to handle it. Though the pandemic exposed failures in governance, its consequences did not end when the crisis ended. The years since have brought their own shifts. The post-pandemic landscape in India is witnessing governance shifts, normalisation of lockdown policies, privatisation of resources, aggravated mental distress, and insecurity. However, many of the pandemic-era injustices remain unresolved. What happened during those years continues to shape people’s citizenship, livelihoods, health, relationships with institutions, and sense of security.
The initiative works through multiple prisms of inquiry – by the people, with the people, and for the people – and treats public accountability as a civic capacity that has to be built, practised, and sustained.
PC-PIC’s ground-level investigations draw on testimonies collected from across India, reporting and documenting how the pandemic continues to shape people’s lives well beyond its acute phase. We begin with a simple thought: people’s narratives as truth. Through community engagement, fieldwork, testimonies, case documentation, participatory research, and data collection, we record truths that are absent from official accounts and mainstream media. These include experiences of livelihood loss, displacement, debt, exclusion from welfare and public services, barriers to healthcare, institutional neglect, and other forms of injustice.
Public hearings are a central part of this process, which becomes a space in which private injury can be converted into a public question and, where possible, into a demand for institutional response, restitution or reform. Our work is rooted in participatory action research where the community holds ownership of the process and governance patterns identified in post-pandemic India enter into public analysis and inquiry, recognising ‘my issue is also their issue’. A panel of People’s Commissioners and a committee constituted as the Public Inquiry Committee collectively analyses these wider patterns, with the findings returned to communities through hearings, dialogue, and public action.
What happens when a national tragedy like the pandemic passes without a public reckoning? When millions carry memories of loss, hunger, debt, displacement, humiliation, and abandonment, but there is no common space in which those experiences can be heard, examined, and placed before the nation?
The People’s Commission & Public Inquiry Committee (PC-PIC) begins with that question.
It draws inspiration partly from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Emerging from the long violence of apartheid, the TRC rested on a profound democratic premise: a wounded society cannot build its future on silence. South Africa sought to build a historic bridge between a deeply divided past and a democratic future. Under Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s chairpersonship, individual testimony acquired public meaning. Truth, acknowledgement, institutional responsibility, restoration of dignity, reparation and non-repetition became parts of a larger moral process. Truth was not justice itself; it was the ground on which justice could begin.
India’s pandemic belongs to a very different history. Yet it produced its own rupture between citizen and state. PIC-PC emerged from these fractures, understanding the pandemic as a governance event as much as a health emergency. It is grounded in the vision that democracy must do more than survive a crisis.
It must remember.
It must account for what happened.
And it must build the civic resolve that it must not happen again.
Uncovering Stories, Making Voices Heard and Holding Government Accountable