Covid-19 excess mortality: India's data 'imagocracy'

What happens when a country has managed to practically destroy its public statistical infrastructure? Precisely what is happening in India these days, with it now trying to stall the World Health Organization (WHO) from publishing its global excess mortality statistics for Covid-19. And a convenient scapegoat here has been the New York Times (NYT) and some in the international media who are just doing their job reporting the facts in this situation.

The standard expected response has also been issued by New Delhi. A tweet from the Press Information Bureau of India on behalf of the government contested the models, officially arguing that a one-size-fits-all approach cannot apply to these excess mortality statistics, which incidentally are being carefully measured and estimated internationally. Indeed, that is precisely why the WHO formed a panel of internationally respected scientists and biostatisticians who constructed their models, estimated their numbers and made them then go through multiple validations and robustness checks. And lo and behold, while there are issues one can also find with Brazil, Indonesia, Russian or Chinese excess mortality statistics – it is India which is being grumpy about it, it seems. Why is that the reason?

Bluntly put, the answer is obvious. It is because the scientific and statistical culture of 'the nation before science' has been robustly espoused in India recently. The intelligent reader can easily connect the dots here on recent debates on academic freedom in places like the Ashoka University or Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and relate it to this situation as well.

Also Read — India is stalling WHO’s efforts to make global Covid death toll public

More broadly, there seems to be also a concerted effort to create a statistical imagocracy* (just like China, if the reader wants to be reminded), which continues to go unpunished by citizens in India, perhaps maimed or in fear of retribution. This is clear when one witnesses the electoral outcomes on the ballot in state elections and reads through the fine print (not just of opaque electoral bonds) where oppressed minorities, like poor Muslims, continue voting for the ruling dispensation for reasons which only they can clarify despite all the suffering from demonetisation, a botched GST, a horribly mismanaged Covid-19, to name a few misfirings by Delhi in policy-making last few years.

The world should also be taking the blame for mollycoddling this impunity around scientific and statistical chicanery in Delhi. It has not only destroyed post-independence India's proud heritage of statistics that boasted the likes of C R Rao and PC Mahalanobis, but it has also made public policy formulation problematic globally, dragging the world down with itself.

Look beyond health statistics, and the evidence is generous. Where are the local media and regulators to discuss why exports have been stalled by the WHO in the last fortnight for the Bharat Biotech Covaxin vaccine? Where are they indeed also to contest regime compliant macroeconomists and financial engineers (can we call them puppetonomists for a change?) as they show their "jadoo ki jhappi (trickery)" with unemployment or GDP statistics?

Also Read — Covid-19: India objects to WHO figures on four million Covid deaths, experts said Govt claims are misleading

Of course, excess mortality statistics in Covid-19 are particularly eye-popping herein. Multiple studies, including one peer-reviewed and published in Science, clearly show that Indian states facilitated both by local and national machinery have grossly underestimated Covid-19 deaths. A large part of it is attributable to Delhi's overconfidence in early 2021, allowing virus-spreading events like religious gatherings or election meetings. Another relates to Delhi nonchalantly abdicating its responsibility for oxygen cylinder supplies during that morbid summer of 2021. Perhaps Delhi also is worried that if the statistics go up by 4-5X even, the burden on the exchequer and the demand for reparations will be onerous, especially given that 2024 national elections are not far away and the Ukraine crisis with the pandemic is already escalating inflation and oil prices.

Yet, the response to it with a three-pager press release is puerile, to say the least. Not one domestic scientist has been invited to form a panel to respond to the WHO or Science study, perhaps simply because no scientist of international professional repute will kowtow to the regime's whims and fancies playing pied piper to their music. This habit may have been easier to pull off in happiness or democracy statistics earlier floated from international authorities and duly contested by Delhi, too, but Covid-19 excess mortality statistics even for compliant scientists is a sensitive area perhaps.

Also Read — Citing WHO data, Centre says India has one of the 'lowest' Covid-19 deaths per million population

And this habit is not recent. The country has been happy to sustain these bad standards in academia, where international journal lists like FT-50 and global university rankings are being contested with local lists and rankings like the NIRF. In addition, arm twisting the world tossing in the populous market opportunity carrot has been a standard complementary tactic as well. A third also has been to deploy friends empathetic to the regime's cause in international agencies like the WHO. These are similar tactics learnt and employed from our friendly neighbours across the Himalayas.

So, while it is not clear what will finally happen to the excess mortality exercise of the WHO, one thing is certain. India is pulling down the quality of science, statistics and evidence-based public policy-making standards globally. Its statistical imagocracy should be stopped now, and the world should not continue to mollycoddle Delhi for its selfish interests.

Author's note:

*Imagocracy is an idea that political economist Sergey Guriev uses in his research with Daniel Treisman (published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives) to characterise autocracies, like in Alberto Fujimori's Peru, where data, statistics and media all remain manipulated. This is exactly what Vladimir Putin does in Russia too. An imagined democracy with a veil of misinformation for the local populace.

(The author is a health economist, a Reader in Economics of Innovation at SPRU-Sussex, University of Sussex, Visiting Fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University & Visiting Adjunct Professor in Economics at IIM-Ahmedabad, India.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.

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