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Chinmay Tumbe of the Department of Economics at the IIM, Ahmedabad, interviewed by Govindraj Ethiraj (Health-check.in/ India Spend)

-Health-check.in

Between 1817 and 1920, India faced three pandemics that wiped out large chunks of its population. What lessons do these events hold for India today on how to manage the ongoing Covid-19 surge and how to plan ahead? Our interview with Chinmay Tumbe.

Mumbai: The Covid-19 pandemic has been with us now for more than a year and in India we are just seeing the beginning of the tapering off of the second wave. We do not know at this point if it will give way to a third wave. It's also equally clear that we don't seem to have learnt the lessons from the first wave unlike some countries that seem to have been better prepared. What India faced, particularly in April-May 2021, will go down in history for more reasons than one. So this is a good time to ask if we have learnt any lessons. I pose the question to Chinmay Tumbe of the Department of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad. He has a Master's from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a PhD from IIM Bangalore. And he has written a book, The Age Of Pandemics (1817-1920), where he looks at three pandemics and how they shaped India and the world.

* First, have we learnt the right lessons or any lessons from the first set of pandemics going back decades, if not centuries, in India?

The quick answer, because of the massive crisis that we've all collectively just gone through, would obviously be 'no' given that we had a first wave. We know from history that pandemics do come in waves. We should have been much more prepared--so we definitely did take the eye off the ball. In that sense, we definitely did not learn from history. I think the larger problem is that until the WHO [World Health Organization] announced this as a pandemic in March 2020, most Indians had never really heard of a pandemic. Even SARS and the stuff that happened in the last 20 years happened somewhere else, it didn't affect India. That's why I wrote this book because India was completely knocked out for nearly a century, and especially those last 50 years from 1870 to 1920, with life expectancy rates falling and death rates, which were already high, increasing. This was a deadly period in Indian history with cholera, plague and then eventually the 1918 influenza pandemic. These really wiped out a lot of Indians.

That particular juncture led to very important improvements in science and technology. And that's why we say in the last 100 years, the big learning over that time is that we are no longer dying at 20; our average life expectancy is 70. It's taken 100 years for the next big pandemic to arrive so the sense of collective memory has definitely been lost. Take, for example, the classic policy error of last year, where history had a lot of lessons to offer. We had a migration crisis where we saw people walk back home and history tells us that there were ways to anticipate what would happen when you enforce a national lockdown. Because the British actually had to face the same tradeoffs, policy choices back then, especially when the plague arrived--do we shut down the trains or not? How hard should the lockdown be? These debates are not new. They are of course new for our generation.

But I think there's been some learning from last year to this as well--we have not seen a migration crisis this year despite major lockdowns. Yes, migrant workers are suffering, but it's simply not the same as last year. That's because we've kept the transport systems alive at a meagre level, but they're alive so that people do not have to walk back home. That is a learning which could have happened last year from 100 years ago but did not. But this year we have one less crisis because last year we had two.

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Image Courtesy: Health-check.in