Listen to podcast (in conversation with Gautam Nair, CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow)
About the Speaker:
Chinmay Tumbe loves to laugh and learn. He is Assistant Professor of the Economics Area at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) and the author of India Moving: A History of Migration. He has published widely on migration, has served on policy-making groups and has worked in India, UK, Italy, and the US. He was the 2018 Alfred D. Chandler Jr. International Visiting Scholar at Harvard Business School and the 2013 Jean Monnet Fellow at the Migration Policy Centre, European University Institute, Florence. Before IIMA, he was a faculty member at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad, and was a student at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, Ruia College, Mumbai and Rishi Valley School, Madanapalle.
About the Seminar:
The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more than 14 million Indians in the span of a few months and is the country's greatest demographic disaster on record. It was also India's worst year in recorded economic history with a real GDP growth rate of negative 10 percent and inflation surging past 30 percent. Despite its significance for epidemiology and economics, it is arguably the least studied event in modern history. This seminar sheds light on various aspects of the disaster based on Tumbe's ongoing research and discusses current COVID-19 challenges against the backdrop of the events of 1918.