Indian constitution exhibits centralising tendencies to maintain unity and integrity of the nation. Elucidate in the perspective of the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897; The Disaster Management Act, 2005 and recently passed Farm Acts.

Centralising design in the Constitution

• Federal in a dual-polity sense, India is not a league of sovereign States: single citizenship, unified judiciary, and Article 3 on State boundaries already tilt to the Union.
• Emergency provisions, the GST Council’s Union vote-weight, and Centrally Sponsored Schemes continue that tilt in ordinary times.
• The 2020 examples are statutes, not amendments, which is how centralisation often arrives: Union legislation on a crisis or on a claimed national market.

Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897

• A colonial public-health statute, it lets a government take special measures and prescribe regulations to prevent the spread of a dangerous epidemic disease.
• In COVID-19 the Union and States used it, with the 2020 ordinance against violence on healthcare workers, as a quick legal peg beside the newer disaster law.
• Centralising tendency: a thin, executive-heavy Act, born to protect imperial ports and troops, still lets a distant government regulate bodies and movement with limited legislative debate.
• Unity rationale: a virus does not stop at a State border; a national frame reduces beggar-thy-neighbour lockdowns.
• Limit: public health is largely a State subject; 1897 does not by itself create a modern rights-based health federalism.

Disaster Management Act, 2005

• The Act builds NDMA, SDMAs, and a chain of plans; Section 6 and the Union Home Ministry’s COVID-19 guidelines turned a disaster statute into a national lockdown instrument from 24 March 2020.
• Migrant-worker distress showed that a Centre-written lockdown without matching State fiscal and shelter capacity is centralisation without capacity.
• Unity rationale: one definition of disaster, one national executive for earthquakes, cyclones, and a pandemic classified as a disaster.
• Federal tension: States ran hospitals and police; they often received instructions more than a co-authored plan, which is the DM Act’s Union-nodal design under stress.

Farm Acts, 2020

• Three Union laws: Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act; Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act; Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act.
• The Union placed them on trade, commerce, and essential commodities — Union and Concurrent entries — while agriculture and markets are the States’ daily field; Punjab and others answered with their own Acts and protests.
• Centralising tendency: a national ‘one nation, one market’ claim over APMC-era State regulation, justified as farmer freedom and integrity of the internal market.
• These Acts were repealed in November 2021 after sustained protest. For a 2020 paper they still illustrate the tendency: the Union legislated first; politics forced a retreat later.
• Unity rationale in 2020 Union speech: fragmented mandi law blocked a national agricultural market. Integrity cost: deep agrarian regions read the package as an attack on MSP and federal compact.

Reading the three together

• Crisis statutes (1897, 2005) centralise in the name of life and order; farm statutes centralised in the name of a national market.
• Both uses fit the Constitution’s Union-heavy map; both need State machines to work.
• Elucidation is not endorsement: unity is a constitutional value (Preamble, Article 19 restrictions, duties), but so is a federal distribution that keeps agriculture and public health politically close to the citizen.