A legal framework plays a key role during public health emergencies as it prescribes the role of governments, their power, and duties as well as responsibilities of citizens to manage the disease spread and promote the population’s health. The WHO’s Influenza Pandemic Preparedness and Response plan when published in 2005 saw a positive response from several countries and many of them updated their public health legislation (Kakkar et al., 2010). The Covid-19 pandemic prompted countries to look back at their legislative measures for their appropriateness and effectiveness to control a pandemic like situation. Countries used different legal means, ranging from public health laws, pandemic-specific laws, disaster management and civil emergency laws, to laws enacted specifically in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, countries such as India, Jamaica, Hong Kong continued to use colonial-era quarantine laws (Mehta et al., 2021).

The existing legal framework and functions of regulatory authorities in India, in times of disease outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics have drawn critical attention of the policymakers, researchers and experts. This paper puts together the literature on the existing legislations that have been invoked to contain the spread of the Covid19 pandemic in India, the draft bills relating to disease outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics and the gaps in the current legislative framework.