An alumnus of Mumbai University and London School of Economics, Chinmay Tumbe is currently assistant professor of economics at IIM-Ahmedabad. Excerpts from an interview with Dilip Thakore:
Congratulations for your timely new book The Age of Pandemics 1817-1920 — How they Shaped India and the World. The subtitle of your book seems to suggest that the history of the great pandemics that swept the world in those years is inadequate and its impact under-estimated. Am I right?
Yes. For instance this age of pandemics between 1817-1920 took over 70 million lives which is about the same loss as in the two World Wars of the 20th century. But although we are well-informed about the World Wars, the public knows very little about the pandemics.
Age of Pandemics provides compelling evidence that in those years, the Indian subcontinent was the epicentre of the great pandemics — Cholera (1817), Plague (1894) and Influenza (1918) — which wiped out 72 million lives worldwide, with an astonishing toll of 40 million in India in the 19th and early 20th centuries. So we should have been well-experienced to manage the latest Covid pandemic. But obviously we were not. How do you explain this conundrum?
Unfortunately, we have little collective memory of that age of pandemics because it is not taught in our schools, nor surprisingly, in our medical colleges. We remember the Jallianwala Bagh tragedy of April 1919 and the hundreds of lives lost, but not the raging influenza pandemic a few months before that incident, which took a toll of nearly 20 million lives. Epidemics tend to slip through history because they are often not clearly identifiable enemies and leave little property destruction behind.
Although the impact of pandemics is measured in terms of lives lost, they also heavily impact the economies of nations. To what extent would you say the 1817- 1920 pandemics were responsible for the precipitous decline of the subcontinent from one of the most prosperous regions of the world for several millennia, to its impoverishment in the 19th and 20th centuries?
I don’t see it as impoverishment as much as relative stagnation and pandemics contributed to that by hurting economic activities. For instance, in 1918-19, real GDP fell by over 10 percent and inflation surged to 30 percent. Pandemics, combined with famines of the late 19th century, had a deadly impact on the Indian economy.
The popular Western narrative is that the prime cause of the subcontinent’s successive pandemics is poor hygiene and sanitation. Yet you suggest that the major causes were rising international trade, continuous movement of British and Indian soldiers within India and the British empire. What’s your comment?
There is little doubt that the British took more precautions against pandemics for their own people in Britain than for Indians in the subcontinent. In the case of cholera, British officials in India resisted scientific evidence that it was water-borne for four decades, and millions of Indians died due to that disease.
In the case of plague, not enough investment was made in improving housing conditions or rat-proofing them. When it came to the influenza pandemic, inefficient food supply management after a bad drought aggravated the problem. While there were British policy failures, most princely states under Indian rulers fared as badly, so accountability was scarce throughout the subcontinent. I would add that three unusual rainfall deficit shocks in the 1870s, 1890s and 1918 aggravated the problem.
Although apologists of almost two centuries of the British Raj over India claim that they brought modern education to India, nationalists including Mahatma Gandhi accused them of uprooting the ‘beautiful tree’ of the organic Indian education system. To what extent did neglect of education in post-independence India make the population vulnerable to the current Covid-19 pandemic?
Education matters for two core reasons: Scientific understanding of how diseases spread is important so that social groups are not scapegoated as they were in the past. The other is in overcoming vaccine hesitancy. Notice that while educated countries in the West were initially hard-hit by the current pandemic, they are making a comeback because
of a pervasive belief in science and vaccination. We need to educate our population to think similarly.
As an economist to what extent do you agree with the contention that our inability to manage the raging Covid-19 pandemic despite a long history of pandemics, is a natural consequence of adoption of inorganic neta-babu socialism and persisting with this failed model?
There are hard trade-offs involved in pandemic management. I would not say that either socialism or capitalism matters in this, but an ear close to the evolving science on the disease definitely helps. That can happen when we have efficient data collection and dissemination systems. For instance, a year and a half after the current pandemic started, we are still not releasing daily all-causes death numbers which is critical for tracking the pandemic, and which many developed countries are now doing.
How heavy is the price that the world’s largest child and youth population residing in India will have to pay for the official and societal mismanagement of the current Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the country?
We have lost so many loved ones in this pandemic. The psychological cost will persist for some time. The livelihoods destroyed will take time to recover so there is a lot of economic misery as well.
What in your opinion are the major lessons that government and the public should learn to prevent and/or manage inevitable health epidemics and pandemics of the future?
The first lesson is that pandemics come in waves. After the first all- India wave, we seemed to think it was all over. Even a cursory look at the history of pandemics in India or what was happening with Covid in other countries should have cautioned us. The second lesson is that we should have vaccine reserves to mitigate the disaster and we should strive for maximum coverage. The third is that we need better metrics to track pandemics on a daily basis, especially since our testing facilities are so limited. We need to release the all-causes mortality statistics collected by the Civil Registration System on a daily basis for all districts of India so we can track the pandemic even where there are limited Covid testing facilities. Moreover, we should not shut down the railways with a four-hour notice period and cause mass misery for millions of our migrant workers.
Any other comment?
There are two core qualities required in navigating pandemics: patience and humility. As I’ve written in my book, there seem to be four stages of pandemics — denial, confusion, acceptance and erasure. Those who erase less from memory will be in less denial mode and navigate the next pandemic better.
Also Read: “Huge need for well-educated public policy professionals”
