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Interviews | Prof. Chinmay Tumbe of IIM Ahmedabad interviewed by Civil Society News
Prof. Chinmay Tumbe of IIM Ahmedabad interviewed by Civil Society News

Prof. Chinmay Tumbe of IIM Ahmedabad interviewed by Civil Society News

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published Published on Sep 10, 2021   modified Modified on Sep 26, 2021

-Civil Society News, Gurugram

THROUGHOUT the first and second waves of the coronavirus pandemic, the extent of the tragedy in India was mostly unknown. How many people had really died? Were they men or women? Information was anecdotal and speculative. This April, there were queues at crematoriums and burial grounds, but even as bodies piled up there were no reliable figures to go by.

We now have some figures based on data-hunting by Prof. Chinmay Tumbe and his colleagues. Tumbe teaches economics at IIM Ahmedabad and his co-workers in this effort are well-versed in accessing databases and arriving at plausible assumptions.

Tumbe is the author of The Age of Pandemics (1817-1920) which chronicles the cholera, plague and influenza pandemics in those years which devastated India. He is also an expert on migration.

In an interview, Tumbe spoke to Civil Society on the importance of data and the story that is emerging of the current pandemic from the numbers that have been garnered.

* You have been collating and analyzing data at the Centre and in the states on the coronavirus pandemic. What does this data reveal to you?

Last year, during the first wave, there were concerns that we weren’t possibly capturing the full extent of deaths for the simple reason that, to be classified as a COVID-19 death, you needed to be first classified as positive. And that depends on testing. Obviously, testing capacity is a huge function of reported deaths. I was sceptical whether there really were many, many deaths. We didn’t see the actual evidence in terms of the visuals, the (crowded) crematoriums, etc that we saw in the second wave. But now we know that even last year there was substantial under reporting because that data has kind of come out.

It is the second wave which is India’s biggest demographic shock since the last quarter of 1918. I think  Divya Bhaskar was the first to really break the stories on deaths in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and so on. So, using the Gujarat data, I pointed out that a lot of excess deaths had happened and since they could not be accounted for they must be from COVID-19. That was in May.

In the last three months, we have five or six studies using different databases, all coming to the same conclusion. I would say the midpoint estimate now among all these different studies is that India has lost about three million people in the pandemic, starting from the beginning to about June 30 this year.

My co-worker, Prabhat Jha, has worked on Indian mortality for almost two decades. He worked with the census office on something called the Million Death Study about 10 years ago. He’s a thorough expert on that. Some of my other co-authors are economists and health economists. We are a team of 11.

Please click here to read more. 

 

Image Courtesy: Civil Society News


Civil Society News, 10 September, 2021, https://www.civilsocietyonline.com/interviews/in-a-pandemic-official-data-is-crucial-and-we-need-it-daily/


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