Did India Lockdown too Early?
In an exclusive interview with HE, S.Subramanian talks about India’s lockdown, the migrant issue, invisible deaths, and relief packages.
S. Subramanian is a former professor of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) and a past Indian Council of Social Science Research National Fellow. He is an elected Fellow of the Human Development and Capabilities Association, and was a member of the advisory board of the World Bank’s Commission on Global Poverty. His work has been on aspects of social and economic measurement, collective choice theory, and development economics. He is the author of, among other books, Rights, Deprivation, and Disparity: Essays in Concepts and Measurement; The Poverty Line; and Economic Offences.
He is also, with Debraj Ray, a co-author of a working paper titled India’s Lockdown: An Interim Report, published by National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a US non-profit research agency. The report analyses, among other things, the State’s response to the COVID pandemic in India, its resort to a draconian lockdown, the philosophy of lockdown, and the adverse consequences for the citizenry of both the disease and the manner in which it has been dealt. Below are the excerpts from the interview.
1. Was the lockdown ineffective in India?
There is no means of knowing how many lives, if any, were saved (from COVID-19) by the lockdown. Official claims of success are based on India’s low Case Fatality Rate (CFR) compared to other (even economically advanced) countries. However, the CFR is a very unreliable indicator of COVID mortality. When allowance is made for the age-distribution of cases and deaths, and for the fact that death from infection occurs after a lag, we find that India’s performance, both absolutely and relatively, has been a good deal worse than is suggested by the CFR statistic. This is, in fact, the subject of a recent paper by Minu Philip and Debraj Ray (of New York University) and myself (‘Decoding India’s Low COVID-19 Case Fatality Rate’). Add to this the costs of the lockdown in terms of livelihoods lost and casualties of life and health from non-COVID causes—and it is hard to think of anything other than ‘failure’ to describe India’s lockdown.
2. Why are Indians more vulnerable than people from other countries to issues associated with lockdown?
India is a developing country, with a massive informal sector, and extremely poorly developed social security mechanisms in place. There has also been an immediate prior history of economic down-turn, with lowered rates of growth, and enhanced rates of unemployment and (mainly rural) poverty. A lockdown with little or no compensating relief measures, coupled with a draconian implementation which failed to keep essential supply chains alive, was a sure recipe for transforming vulnerability into a disaster.
3. Do you think deaths due to other factors remained invisible during a lockdown?
Yes, substantially so. There is no easy way of tracking deaths due to an over-stressed health infrastructure incapable of dealing with non-COVID life-threatening diseases such as cancer, heart ailment and tuberculosis; due to starvation; due to long-term health damage; due to intimate-partner violence; and due to excesses in enforcement.
4. How could we have better handled the migrant issue?
Kerala and Vietnam showed the way by resorting to a systematic and rigorous regimen of testing, tracing, tracking and quarantining in the earliest phase of disease progression. This was no part of central government strategy. Migrants should have been allowed—in fact, enabled—to return home before the case growth rate accelerated and before the lockdown was implemented (with just 4 hours notice). Instead, they were subjected to the worst forms of precipitation into distress, poverty, unemployment, loss of income, hunger, immobilisation, and the excesses of enforcement. By the time they were allowed to return home, the situation was ripe for the carriers to spread the infection from the towns to their native villages.
5. What sort of relief package would have helped the poor?
There has been no dearth of specific and detailed advice on the sorts of relief measures that needed to accompany the lockdown. For specificity, let me refer to the suggestions, at the micro-level, offered by people like Jean Dreze and Reetika Khera; and at the macroeconomic level, by people like Pronob Sen. Everything seems to have fallen on deaf ears. A fiscal stimulus touted as amounting to 10% of GDP turned out to be a damp squib 1% affair when it was shorn of its window-dressing. Most economic measures were aimed at easing liquidity constraints when banks were ill-prepared to lend, and customers ill-prepared to make productive use of loans, in an environment of severely depressed demand and acute physical constraints on the supply side of the equation. Amazingly, a great deal of advice, even on deploying the Public Distribution System to ease the phenomenon of hunger, was ignored.
6. Was the lockdown eased too soon?
In earlier work done on the subject by Professor Debraj Ray of NYU and myself, we have always been careful to point out that we do not oppose the idea of a lockdown.
But we mean a lockdown which is accompanied by a comprehensive system of relief measures to compensate the poor and labouring classes for their travails during the shut-down; one during which the health infrastructure is upgraded; personal protective equipment (PPE) is made widely available; testing is pursued rigorously and on a vastly increased scale; a genuine and substantial fiscal stimulus is arranged; data on crucial aspects of the disease are placed in the public domain in a spirit of transparency and sharing; policy-makers invite and implement the best advice available from epidemiologists, public health experts, economists and other professionals; and the centre assists, protects and promotes the interests of its states in a proper spirit of federalism. None of these elements has been a feature of the Indian lockdown. So there can be no question of ‘easing too soon’ a lockdown of the type that never should have been implemented in the first place.
7. What could have been some of the best practices that could have been adopted from prosperous countries?
We have experts in our country that have an intimate knowledge of local conditions and are also abreast of developments in advanced countries. In particular, I speak of professionals who have the wisdom to accept what is relevant to our needs and to reject what is contra-indicated, from the experience of countries from which we can learn. I’d say: consult these professionals of ours, here and abroad: they have been willing and prepared to assist! But you too must be prepared to ask for and accept assistance!
Dr S. Krishnamoorthy, Senior Consultant, Apollo
“Implementation of lockdown by the Indian government has proved effective for most areas if not all. The increasing case count overall cannot be attributed to the ineffectiveness of the lockdown as it is really meant to flatten the curve of impact and reduce the pressure on the health sector. The major factor that could have led to the widespread carelessness of the public for not following the lockdown guidelines and basic preventive measures like social distancing, wearing masks and maintaining personal hygiene.
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