IIMs and historically-minded research? Two new PhD theses coming from @IIMAhmedabad and @iimb_official study phenomena over nearly a century, especially on entrepreneurship.

Was lucky to be on both their dissertation committees. Brief thread on what we learn from them (1/7) Manjunath A N (IRS officer) at @iimb_official looked at the entrepreneurial history of old Mysore region (1881-1956) based on a wide range of sources. This is just one page of many, on the type of sources used.

📢The 2023 Caste Census of Bihar allows us to see century-long demographic change in castes for a sizeable Indian region for the first time.

This thread compares the Bihar Census of 1931 with 2023 and reveals: Broad stability+ The significance of migration selectivity (1/12) The last publicly available Caste Census was carried out in 1931 when Bihar was part of Bihar & Orissa. 10 districts of Bihar 1931 Census correspond to the modern state of Bihar (99% match). Marked in Census Admin Atlas 1931 map from 1-6 & 8-11 and listed in Census caste tables.

Here's the list of the ten largest companies of British India in 1921 by paid-up capital.

Today's thread is on the little known firm ranked at No. 1: Burma Corporation, a mining firm founded by an engineer who went on to become the President of the USA! (1/n)

https://twitter.com/ChinmayTumbe/status/1536576637512212485

Burma Corporation is remarkably less researched so much of what we know is because of recent research by @ProfBaillargeon via his doctoral thesis and this paper in @EntandSoc.

Today was the first time in my life that I held a newspaper describing an Olympic Indian Hockey medal victory!
So I went back in time to see how it must have felt 11 previous times.
1928. Amsterdam. Gold Medal. No goals conceded by India in tournament.
Times of India. June 23. 1932. Los Angeles. Gold Medal. Only three teams that year. India beat Japan 11-1 and USA 24-1. 'Dhyanchand' and 'Rupsingh' starred in victories.
TOI. 1932. Aug 6 and 13. But not featured on the newspaper's front page!

Our inter-disciplinary research team estimates excess mortality in India from June 2020 to June 2021 at 2.7-3.4 million (most of it in the 2nd wave), using 3 different databases, including the only survey that asked a question on Covid deaths.
Pre-Print: medrxiv.org/content/10.110… Great to learn from co-author Prof. Prabhat Jha and his team, who has probably spent more time over the past two decades working on Indian mortality than anyone else (See their "Million Death Study"). His twitter handle is literally @countthedead.

How bad was the recent Covid wave shock on rural India?
Very Bad.
Important clues emerge from recently released death data through facilities-based Health Management Information system (HMIS).
First: States that took the hit early on.
Thread (1/n) HMIS is different from CRS in that it is more rural, has less coverage and is facilities-based. Hence, noisier time series. Focussing on states with reasonably stable pre-pandemic baselines in this thread.

Tamil Nadu has one of the best death registration systems in India.
In 2021, I estimate 100K+ 'excess deaths' for Jan1-June 20, 2021 as against 19K reported Covid-19 deaths.
A thread on understanding TN's district-level variation of these numbers.(1/n) Good correlation between reported Covid deaths per capita and excess deaths per capita for Jan1-June20, 2021. This is good to know for TN govt. because reported Covid numbers on spatial variation did not distort ground reality within TN as it may have done ACROSS states in India.

We now have decent estimates of excess mortality for first five months of 2021 for 4 large states (MP, AP, TN, KN) comprising around 300 million people and 21% of Indian population.
Excess mortality in these 4 large states exceeds 500K compared to 46K reported Covid deaths (1/n) Among the 4 states, the ones showing relatively higher reported Covid deaths per million in India (Tamil Nadu, Karnataka) have relatively LOWER excess deaths per million than AP and MP.
Excess deaths per million of 1,800 for 4 states for 2021 is HIGH on a global scale.

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, which state of India should we go after now if at all?

Karnataka.

Enough info. is available to estimate a covid death under-reporting factor of 3-5 in 2021.

Method in this thread (1/n)
For previous state level under-reporting factors, see👇🏾

https://twitter.com/ChinmayTumbe/status/1404265782423425028

For the 163 day period (Jan1-Jun13), Karnataka registered around 200K deaths as average between 2015-18 (MCCD report 2019). With annual growth rates of those times, projecting 210K-240K deaths for Jan 1- Jun 13 in normal times in 2021.

You want to know how silly inter-state comparisons of reported covid deaths per million compare with excess deaths per million. Thanks to the work of @Rukmini , we can see this for 3 states.

MP is one-fourth of TN on 'reported' and 1.5 times MORE than TN on excess deaths. (1/4) In general, we will see that MORE urban the state, the less the death under-reporting factors because our protocols demand Covid testing before a person can be declared Covid dead. Therefore, testing capacity obvious determinant of reported covid death count.

My article in the Indian Express today.

Places the potential Covid death under-reporting factor in Gujarat for April 1-May 10, 2021, at 11.

Unfortunately, high chance of 1 Million+ Deaths in India in second wave.

Twitter thread on method (1/n).

indianexpress.com/article/opinio… @Divya_Bhaskar @DevendraBhatn10 broke story on May 14, showing a death under-reporting factor of 16 for March1-May10, using 2020 as the reference.
I use April1-May10, 2019 as the reference and project for 2021 using 2017-19 growth rates and get under-reporting factor of 11.

Lot of talk on the scale of under-reporting of deaths in India in this Covid19 wave. My research on the 1918 influenza outbreak in India placed it as 3x i.e. about 20 million deaths instead of the 6 million reported then. A thread on how researchers calculate such stuff (1/n) The first estimates were given by Norman White in February 1919 as 6 million based on the data the govt. was collecting. This covered only British India and not the princely states where such data was rarely collected + the death registration system collapsed during the pandemic.

Over the last week, Covid has overtaken TB as the single most dangerous communicable disease in India, crossing the 1,000 daily death mark and moving into the 2,000 zone. Table below shows comparison of daily deaths in India and US in pre-Covid times. Short morbid thread (1/n) 2K Covid daily deaths (reported) on 26K daily deaths (pre-Covid) reflects close to 10% surge. In US, in early-Feb, 5K Covid daily deaths on 8K daily deaths (pre-Covid) reflected close to 60% surge. At that kind of a surge rate, India would have 15K Covid daily deaths.

Building on this thread on company towns, a new thread on another form of urban governance structure, that we all have seen, visited and maybe even lived in: Cantonments! (1/n).

https://twitter.com/ChinmayTumbe/status/1381495877433352195

There were 59 Cantonments listed by Census 2001 and their distribution across India closely mirrors the history of British military pursuits....more dense between Calcutta and Delhi and very few in South India.

Prompted by @CafeEconomics, a short thread on company towns in India like Tatanagar (Jamshedpur), Kirloskarwadi, Modinagar (all three pre-1947) and the ones that followed them. (1/n)

https://twitter.com/CafeEconomics/status/1380532752131317761

Urban governance structures in India are of various types, as shown in this table. Jamshedpur is today a Notified Area Committee (NAC). There were 36 Industrial Notified Areas/Townships in 2011. They have municipal functions, and can often raise taxes.

While there are books on Maruti-Suzuki and ITC, we do need good business histories on Colgate, Asian Paints, Pidilite, Exide and Laxmi Machine Works which have all held market dominance for so long. A brief thread on Indian corporate biographies.

https://twitter.com/LloydMathias/status/1310474466799968257

My favorite is Muthiah's 'The Spencer Legend'; Spencer was the pioneer with a pan-Indian retailing in early 20th c, aggressive M&A and lots of interesting strategies. On Indian retailing history, see our work at: emerald.com/insight/conten…

That time of the year where students look for reference letters for applying for PhD abroad. A short thread on academics doing well, having done their PhD's in India (within past 20-odd years). Foreign PhDs are great. Indian too. #AtmaNirbharAcademia Dr. Manu V Devadevan, winner of Infosys Prize 2019, PhD from Managalore University in 2011, now at IIT Mandi. Incredibly multi-lingual. Inspiring story. onmanorama.com/news/campus-re…

Lot of trash history gets peddled on social media. So worth publicizing actual historical scholarship when it comes out. For over 5 decades, Indian Economic and Social History Review has been a great outlet for historians (esp. non-Marxist). Latest issue thread👇🏾 Slavery had different forms in India. Richard Eaton and Indrani Chatterjee have a great edited volume on this. In this paper, new insights from a 13th c. text.

Kalyani Vartak and I have a book chapter on 'Migration and Caste' that came out a few months back. A very short thread with link to the article in the end. We review around 100 studies on this subject and our own work and propose a framework, as shown in this chart. At the macro level, as observed in previous studies (esp. by @priyadeshingkar @ArjanDevDebate ), there is a broad positive relationship between caste rank and out-migration in longer duration migration streams and inverse relationship in shorter duration migration streams.

"कितने आदमी थे?" बहुत, सरकार | A migration-thread with estimates of India's reverse migration since mid-March 2020, placed conservatively at 30 million or 3 crore or 15-20% of the urban workforce. Phase 1, just before the lock-down, saw people go back for the Holi festival. A conservative estimate of 5 million based on old passenger traffic data as the number that stayed on, mostly within-state migration.

We now have an estimate of 2.1 million inter-state migrant workers in Gujarat due to an exercise carried out by the state govt. to find out how many want to go back home. A very short thread on its relevance for estimating migration in India.
timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad… As per the Census, Inter-state migrant workers (those who moved for work/employment) in Gujarat grew by 70% from 0.7 million in 2001 to 1.2 million in 2011 and at that growth rate, the number would have grown to 1.9 million in 2021.