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. . .
