The COVID-19 pandemic has led to focus on practices and discourses of welfare across the world. It has pushed states to adopt a more proactive welfare approach to certain areas of human life, such as healthcare. On the other hand, a "societal" response based on the work of mutual-aid groups, voluntary networks and associations has also been an important aspect of how communities have attempted to survive. In countries like India, especially in metropolitan cities, the latter took the shape of slum-dwellers and the working poor inventing new strategies to cope and help their communities, preparing the ground for a "bio-politics" from below. This chapter explores the intersection of governance and welfare in order to understand the shifts that have been induced or revealed by the COVID-19 crisis. First, it maps the institutional responses driven by the central government in Delhi that were justified by the COVID-19 emergency. By doing so, it seeks to analyse the tensions that the pandemic has revealed or amplified regarding centre-state relationships. The second section sets out the redeployment of some core elements of India’s social welfare during the pandemic, while situating these changes in their larger political and institutional context. The chapter concludes by discussing the importance of subnational responses to the COVID-19 crisis.