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It is said that shared experiences can bring us closer.
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By the same token, can shared suffering make us more empathetic?
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There has never been a period of time in our history when so many have suffered together.
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At some point in the last few months, and perhaps in just the last few weeks, every
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family in India has known of loss or grief or anger in some form or the other.
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Every day, anodyne phrases that one just said reflexively have taken on deeper meaning.
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These days, when I say how are you, or is everything okay, or take care, I mean those
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There is so much bad news around me that I should be numbed by now, but I am the opposite
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Every loss I hear about makes all other losses blaze within me, and I see that most people
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I speak to feel the same.
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We are alive to the pain of other people.
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We are not islands anymore.
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And here I must ask the question, what will we do with this outpouring of empathy?
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Instead of just feeling bad for others, is there any way that we can help them?
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is one of my favorite thinkers in this country, Ashwin Mahesh.
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But Ashwin is not just a thinker, he is also a doer.
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Listeners of this show will remember him from episode 160, where we spoke about participatory
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democracy and Ashwin outlined the many different ways in which citizens can empower themselves
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by working with this state.
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He himself has been at the forefront of much civic activism and action, and he kicked it
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into a new gear in this pandemic.
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There were immediate problems that needed to be addressed, people needing food, medicine,
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and there were deeper problems behind them that Ashwin has already been working to solve
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I spoke a few months ago with Ashwin's colleague in Mumbai, Ruben Mascarenas, one of the founders
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of the Khana Chaiye movement that fed hungry people during the lockdown last year, especially
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the migrant workers abandoned by both their employers and the state.
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Ruben's been active helping people in Mumbai with medicines and beds during the second
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wave and Ashwin's been organizing that kind of relief work at scale.
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So much so that even governments have reached out to his network to get things done.
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I was delighted to have Ashwin on the show to chat about his experiences and learnings,
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and as it happens, there are also threads of a continuing discussion here.
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In my last wildly popular episode with Kartik Moolidharan on India's healthcare, you might
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have heard my skepticism about getting the state to do the few things it should do.
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To me, society will have to solve its own problems, we cannot rely on the dysfunctional
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Kartik argued with me then on the importance of working with the state and cited Ashwin's
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words from previous episodes to back up his argument.
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And in this episode, Ashwin carries that argument forward.
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I love the work both of them do, I think it's important, I hope many young people get inspired
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But before we get to my conversation with Ashwin, let's take a quick commercial break.
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The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
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Turning and turning in the widening jaya, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.
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Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the
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blood named tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
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The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
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This poem by Yeats could be about so many things, and most of all it can be about revolution.
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The center cannot hold, the people rise up, what was once taken for granted is now washed
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Revolutions, both good and bad, have always fascinated me, and if you feel that way as
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well, I have a recommendation for you.
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Head on over to the sponsors of this episode, The Great Courses Plus, at thegreatcoursesplus.com
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Ashwin, welcome to the scene of The Unseen.
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I mean, always good to be back with you.
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So you know, before we get down to the subject at hand, we spoke last three or four months
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And at that point in time, I asked you how the pandemic was for you.
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And we almost spoke of it in the past tense, it felt like it was getting over and the worst
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And these have been like incredibly difficult times for all of us in various different ways.
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I'll ask you the same question again, that I think I started that episode with.
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How have the last few months been for you?
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It's hard to say, obviously, it goes up and down based on what is happening in any one
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So the experience of it is really what's happening in this city.
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The rest of it is what you hear and read and things like that.
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And then the second kind of experience is whether you yourself have had COVID or your
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family members have had COVID.
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And therefore it comes close to you and your friends have had COVID.
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And then as those months go on and on, inevitably someone you know has died.
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And clearly that has been a sad thing.
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It's sad when anyone dies.
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And it's sad when so many people die on such a scale.
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But it's sad when someone you know in a different way, you know what I mean?
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Someone you know personally.
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It's sad in a different way, not because you know them, but because you know more about
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It was sad about Sunil Jain's death, for example, the other day.
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I think he was just one of those nice guys.
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Some of my friends went through near-mise experience, you know, when it came very close.
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Some of my friends have had multiple family members who have died.
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There's no good way to think about it.
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My wife and mother-in-law had COVID.
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And that was kind of an interesting experience, isolation, quarantine.
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Unfortunately, they had a mild case of it.
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And I think I just I feel like I already had COVID several times.
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So I haven't figured out that part.
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There's no proper diagnosis of it by anybody yet.
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But just the way we went through the last 15 months, there were many, many times when
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I told myself this must be it.
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And I'm sure all of us have that kind of experience as well.
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It's been sad, to tell you the truth.
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It's also been hectic, because as the thing started to get out of hand, you can't stand
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You have to do something.
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And getting into it means that there's no getting into it in a small way.
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I mean, if you get into it in a small way, every little bit helps.
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But from certain vantage points, there is no way of getting into it in a small way.
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So I've sort of dived headfirst into it, knowing fully well that it was the shallow end of
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For all of us, it is the shallow end of the pool.
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And diving is the only way to get in in some way.
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It is what it is with, you know, I know I say that a lot, but it's tragic.
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But it's necessary now to just get on with it, whatever is needed for intervention.
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And at some level, like in the last two weeks in particular, I've just clouded out my mind
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saying, I don't want to know anything else.
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I don't want to know the news.
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I don't want to know even the things that I would normally follow.
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There's a certain kind of silence even in the house, you know what I mean?
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Everybody is in WFH mode, the kids are schooling from home, obviously, but there's still a
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kind of silence in the house.
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It's the silence of getting on with doing what needs to be done, just choosing and not
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choosing not to be able to look at anything else in some way.
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It's sort of personal in a way that I can't really explain.
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But, you know, these are not normal times, clearly.
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But I think even emotionally, these are not normal times.
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You know, one way and, you know, we'll explore different angles of this today, like how we
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look differently at the state or society or markets or whatever.
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But what has kind of struck me just thinking aloud is that people have been forced to look
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inwards a little bit more in a number of different facets.
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And I think aloud here, for example, for example, life and death, where we almost live under
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the illusion that we will live forever with almost an illusion of mortality at a rational
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We know we will die, but we behave as if you're going to live forever and equally for our
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loved ones and the people around us, we behave as if they're going to be there till one day
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But you get over it, you get on with it.
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And for most of us, the frequency of that happening is low enough that we can cope that
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it just seems and a break from normalcy instead of normalcy itself.
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And I think that's one of the ways in which we have been forced to re-examine, like I've
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heard people in their 30s discussing how they're going to make a will and all of that.
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And these are not things that one normally thinks about, you know.
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Another aspect in which I think it has changed is in the way that we look at relationships,
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maybe relationships with the ones who are gone, maybe relationships with the ones who
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are still here, where you realize that you cannot take anything for granted.
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And of course, the pandemic throws families together because of the lockdown, forcing
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them to sort of stick around.
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And you know, that can be unpleasant for some people, especially, you know, I keep hearing
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horror stories of women who are already in bad marriages, but it's okay, they don't have
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And suddenly you're at home with the other person and there's no escape.
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You have to face up to what's not good about that.
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And equally, there are many cases where you come to appreciate the other person so much
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more for those of us who are fortunate, that's great.
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Another way is not just re-examining your relationship with other people, but your relationship
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with the world around you.
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You know, you kind of look a little closer at that and by the world around you, I mean,
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other people outside your immediate circles who you might not have noticed, you know,
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in your bubble and you notice them a bit more.
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And then finally, your relationship with life, where you question the things that you do
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and you wonder about the reasons why you do them.
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Like so much of ambition seems so shallow and meaningless because the question is, you
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know, even if I get that, so what?
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So then I think the larger questions come up of how do you live your life?
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How do you find meaning and maximize what there is?
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Is any of this stuff that you've thought about as well?
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I don't agree with the last part.
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I'm going to come back to that, but I also wanted to say it's not only about the people
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that you know, it's even the people that you hear of.
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For instance, you know, when I heard about your loss, I said, well, I don't know your
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I never knew him, but it's still your loss.
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In some ways, even your loss is my loss, you know what I mean?
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Because it's a kind of extended kinship.
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So it's not always people that you know, you just hear about it.
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It's just one of those things.
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But I also have come to the conclusion that if we are going to get through this, I don't
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think in the short term, we can count on a different kind of behavior from people to
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It's not going to happen again and again and again.
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I think what you were saying, if I can put it in a more sort of, I won't call it layman,
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but in more direct language, you would think, are in the face of a pandemic, will you change
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That's the question you're asking.
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It's still like, nah, but I, she said, and if that thing is not going to make you change
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your behavior and rethink the meaning of life and the purpose of life and all that, is that
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not enough to tip you over into a different way of thinking?
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And I'm terrified that the answer is no.
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For most people, it's not.
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I'll give you an example.
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During the last couple of weeks in particular, when it's really been a scramble to say, do
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what you can, where you can, round up as many people to do what is possible, and we'll discuss
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It's not really a simple thing, but especially in this last two weeks when it's been such
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a scramble, you come into many, many conversations where you're talking to people about the urgency
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I have a helicopter swirling overhead.
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In a previous episode with Gautam Menon, there were ambulances outside, which readers commented
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I think a helicopter is a less sad sound.
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So there've been many instances where you're sort of sitting in front of a person.
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You spent whatever time explaining the phenomenal urgency of what needs to be done today.
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And you hear an answer which is completely like, you know, they've not heard you at all.
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I mean, our executive committee meets every 15 days.
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We'll come back with a decision at that.
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You'll have an answer by the end of the month.
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I understand the processes that organizations set up, but I'm just, you know, especially
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among people with the capacity to help, I feel if they were not already the helpful
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type to begin with, I don't think they're going to change pandemic or not.
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And that's actually the saddest part of it.
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And what that tells me that the problem is not only the pandemic.
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Problem is that we have allowed a certain kind of society to emerge in which even in
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the face of a pandemic, you would not fundamentally do too much different.
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And I think whatever be the nature of the response, you have to weave this knowledge
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into that response and build some kind of a strategy for addressing that as well.
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I think it has become too easy to accept that the world is screwed up.
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Other people are screwed up.
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And everybody else is part of that too, but it doesn't apply to me.
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And because the world is screwed up, I really can't expect much, nor do I have to give anything
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It's a kind of, I think it's a distance of some kind partly, but it's also, I think it's
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scary in different ways.
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And as we go along, I think some of the anecdotes that I'll give you will give you that sense
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But I've seen people give extraordinary efforts in response to the crisis around them.
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And the only thing I can say is that they were always heroes.
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It's just more people are seeing them as heroes now.
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But even around them, if people were not inclined to be heroic or even compassionate and do
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something to help, they're not going to do that even in a pandemic, number one.
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But there is one group of people who are inclined to do the right things for the right reasons.
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And for whatever reason, their connections to doing things for the right reasons for
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various outcomes were never very good.
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So they did what they could locally, if they had a domestic helper, they would pay them
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If they knew somebody in the neighborhood who was on hard times, they would help them
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They were inclined to help, but they were inclined to help at a very personal level.
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And while that is genuinely a good thing, they had never sort of had the opportunity
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or the capacity, I'm going to say, partly out of benefit of doubt, that they weren't
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part of a larger system of helping.
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I think that's what it is, that if more people get connected to a larger system of helping,
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because we are now trying to help in such a large way, I would see that as the most
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And that is also why we are being very careful in a lot of the relief work that I'm sort
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of part of, at least, to say that the system of people helping each other has to be at
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the heart of how we respond.
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It is not a techno-managerial problem.
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It is a sociopolitical problem.
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And therefore, you have to respond like it's a sociopolitical problem.
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You have to accept that we are like them and they are like us, both ways.
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And I think that has to be in the middle of any response.
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And generally, I feel a lot of people are inspired to take that extra step.
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They are inclined to be helpful.
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They've done it in small ways in the past.
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But when they see the opportunity to do something really big, and when it clicks in their mind
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that this is not just a linear extension of what I've been doing, but really, it's sort
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of helps me do more and also sort of cements in my mind an imagination of what I could
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be and how I should be living, they do make that effort.
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But they were already inclined to do some good things in their own ways and were doing
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Those who are trapped either individually or procedurally in disinclination, it's very
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hard to yank them out of that space.
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And therefore, one of the really important things in any relief mission is to be able
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to spot that in the first five minutes.
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If the guy is not going to do anything, you have to move on as quickly as possible.
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And I should also say for this reason, because it's so sociopolitics, and let's leave the
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political, we'll come to the political, because it's so social as well, we sort of broke it
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down into channels of social connection.
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There is one channel from the development sector itself, people whose lives anyway reflect
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an ongoing commitment to helping others in some way.
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Then there's a second set of people who have capacity to do something at an individual
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I'm a professional in some company.
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Yes, I could talk to my boss about doing something from the company, but I could also talk to
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the CSR team and do some other things.
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Before all that, right now, this minute, I can write a cheque for three lakh rupees or
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There's a limit to that, but it's my capacity.
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I can decide right now.
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I can do it right away.
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There's one set of people who are doing a very interesting exercise of reaching out
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to others in that capacity and trying to build that network.
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Just get on with this business of building this channel and just do it, talk to others
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like you, who you think will do.
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Many of these people are also in middle management and other leadership roles in companies, so
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they can organize other kinds of support.
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They can find tech volunteers, they can find some of them are in companies with multiple
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offices in multiple cities, they can get people from different offices to be part of what
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They have some other capacity as a result of their professional role play, and when
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they make the decision to do something themselves first, there's a way in which it naturally
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extends to the ecosystem around them.
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So that's a second channel.
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So you have the development channel, and then you have the individual empathetic professional
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These are both really good, if you ask me.
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And then you can always build a crowdsourcing fundraising strategy on both of these channels
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It's not that difficult.
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And for something like this, you don't have to explain the problem very much, so it's
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manageable in that sense.
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Then there is the larger money, which is coming from institutions in the form of organized
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It could be CSR money, it could be procurement of some things that are needed, and there's
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a lot of equipment that needs to be procured.
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That is almost as slow or as quick as it has always been.
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That's not moving any faster, as fast as I can tell.
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A lot of them will tell you that we are doing something for COVID relief, and I think that's
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I'm not going to say that they are lying, but they're not doing it any faster than they
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would have done it for any other development proposal that was sitting in front of you.
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The turnaround of that is not anywhere close to what it could be, given the potential of
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that money to make a difference.
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There is, however, one group within that.
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I wouldn't call it the professional corporate sector, but there's another set of people
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who are owners of their businesses, or they are effectively de facto their owners of their
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businesses, and can therefore make decisions on money a lot faster.
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These actually tend to be more industrial companies, rather than the service companies
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Those guys tend to make decisions much faster, and it's also a lot easier for them because
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they connect with this welfare of my workers logic a little more directly.
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Some of their focus and preference is to help locally where they are, which is understandable,
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but also some of them are saying, look, I don't mind if you want to distribute some
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of my capacity more widely.
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So that's one part of the professional industrial type thing.
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But the last one that I'll talk about in this sequence is the large donors, who are essentially
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saying, we need to solve the procurement channel here.
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We've got to figure out how to get 4,000 oxygen plants into the country, or get them built
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We have to figure out how to crack the zeolite supplies.
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We have to figure out how to have enhanced vaccine production capacity inside the country.
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We have to figure out how testing and genome sequencing can keep pace with what's actually
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happening on the ground.
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And there are weaknesses in all of this, and the weaknesses are not small.
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The weaknesses are like, the need is 100, and we are doing three, or something like
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It's like massive caps.
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So the big donors are looking at that, but they're also trying to figure out what is
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a spectrum of allocation that makes sense when you have a lot of money.
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Because they realize that if you have a lot of money to, let's say, buy oxygen plants,
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yes, it does fill one part of the need if you say, I'll commit to buying 500 oxygen
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But there are lots and lots of things around.
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You don't really have the technicians in place to support 500 oxygen plants.
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So at the very least, you'd have to make investments in a manpower strategy.
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Who can crack this manpower strategy?
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Then you start to ask Quran, and you say, OK, can money help?
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Can urban company help?
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You start to ask the questions that are these complementary things.
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The good news about these large pools of capital for this relief work is that they're reasonably
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well connected across multiple sectors, partly through the investment firms, but even otherwise.
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And there's a reasonable age group in which a lot of them are.
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Some would say, I should really be saying a lot of us are.
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But in a way, it's easier to say, look, we've all run companies, therefore we know ABCD.
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We know which kind of capacity connects to another kind of capacity.
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Lots of people have raised money from investors.
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You know who those investors have also raised money from, tap those channels, figure out
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how to move the conversations along, and figure out what the deployment strategy for money
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should be in a way that gives you some confidence in what you know.
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But there are also important differences in that.
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Some are doing it this way.
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Some are saying, in all of this, we have to work with the government, and therefore we'll
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go through the government channels.
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Some are saying both things, that it's complicated to work with the government channels.
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Also, there's a certain amount of worry that the outcomes that you're pursuing may be compromised
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if you go through some of those channels.
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And some are saying, look, yes, you have to sort of accept that, because the channel is
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large if you work with the government, and some inefficiency, some loss even, is acceptable
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if you can work with that.
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It's better to get something done in scale than to look for the ideal there.
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There are details, and there are details in these types of things.
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So this is the other category.
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There's one other category, which is the government itself.
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I mean, let's think of the government as money for the moment.
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Government as capital or government as intervener, and we separate that from government as government.
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Government as money has its own challenges, because in theory, they have a fair amount
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of capital of money, but in practice, that money, there's a lot of pressure on that money
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to do so many other things, even within the framework of a pandemic.
#
Protect livelihoods, figure out the vaccine strategy.
#
There's a lot of stuff.
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There's a pressure on that money.
#
And the health care system in particular is overwhelmed.
#
And most people, when they hear this word overwhelmed, they think the hospital normally
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can take 50 people, but it's getting 80.
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That's actually not the level of overwhelming that's going on.
#
The hospital can take 50, they're getting 350, right?
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It's 7X and 8X in many places.
#
There are PHCs, primary health centers, where people call to say, in my jurisdiction, there
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are 2,500 positive cases of COVID.
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And I'm the only worker in this health center for a variety of reasons.
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And typically, that last worker is a woman.
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It's only going to be a few days before her husband, her father says, you can't go.
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If this is the situation out there, you can't go to work or you're going to get COVID anyway.
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It's better you get fake COVID.
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These kinds of realities will start to emerge if you're not careful in this stuff.
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And some of them, we are seeing that.
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I'm not making up those realities.
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These are not just possibilities.
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So the government's money is slow to execute because of the procurement rules in government.
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And when you bypass them also, it's not easy.
#
The government's procurement of what is needed, whether it's people or anything else, it works
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on the assumption that people always want to sell to you because you're a bulk buyer.
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You put out a tender for something, typically, you'll find somebody bidding.
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But in a situation like this, when the thing you're trying to bid or buy, whether it's
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an oxygen plant or a concentrator or whatever it is, or a ventilator, that thing is in such
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demand, not just in India.
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The Brazilians want it.
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Everybody wants the thing that you're trying to buy in scale, massive volumes.
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So if you put out a tender, nothing will happen.
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Nobody will even bother.
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Sometimes you have to put out a really large tender.
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For example, there are districts now where they're saying we'll hire pulmonologists on
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short-term 11-month contracts at four lakhs a month, which is, you know, in the government
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sector, that's pretty decent money.
#
It's impressive money, I would even say, in the government sector.
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But in many scenarios, you're not actually going to see it.
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Maybe people will respond, maybe the doctor making a lakh and a half, two lakh at a private
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hospital will think, why not, 11 months, I can do some stuff in a government hospital
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and make twice that money.
#
But that's not going to add fundamental capacity.
#
It's either he's doing something in the private sector hospital or he's doing it in the public
#
It's not an extra doctor.
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It's the same doctor, in some sense.
#
So this kind of money doesn't create rapid manpower.
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That's a different problem.
#
But in equipment, you can certainly do that.
#
You can certainly, you know, you can have 10 more things produced.
#
But the bidding and tendering process is just simply not there.
#
You can even say, I will allow no bid contracts to happen.
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I will allow procurement to happen.
#
But there is nobody in government who's gone out and procured in that way, in a competitive
#
way by calling up a vendor, having that conversation, negotiating the details, all of that stuff.
#
That's why their procurement is slow.
#
And so they need a little bit of handholding in that for the large purchases, somebody.
#
So one of the ways in which you can make up for slow procurement is through bulk purchasing.
#
So you say, look, it'll take me three weeks to figure out how to execute the thing.
#
But let's buy 300 of the things that we are buying in sort of 10.
#
So therefore, TK, it makes up.
#
Maybe some guy can do it really faster than me, but he can only buy 10 at a time.
#
So you know, you catch up in the long run.
#
But it also means that in the immediate term, you can't do anything.
#
And if people are dying 4,000 a day, you know, the reports are 4,000 a day.
#
The actuals, I'm certain, are not that number.
#
You can't do anything in the near term because it takes you three weeks to get organized.
#
So these are the role players in how the response needs to be organized.
#
And then there are these people creating new solutions, right?
#
How do you create a 10-bed ICU in a small geography?
#
How do you create a new oxygen-generating plant?
#
It'll take you three months, but after that, you'll be able to produce five a day.
#
And then the Maruthis and the Lindays of the world, we're trying to fix key pieces of the
#
How do you get the tankers in place, the supply in place?
#
How do you create oxygen hubs?
#
I mean, the number of things that need to be done here is spectacular.
#
I'll send you a list of how we are bucketing the things that need to be done, right?
#
What needs to be done in the hospital, what needs to be done outside the hospital, what
#
needs to be done in the supply chain, what needs to be done for baseline healthcare itself,
#
what needs to be done in the genome companies, what needs to be done on the fundraising side.
#
It's a very, very large number of things that need to be done.
#
And it's impossible, really, from any vantage point, to have a full picture of it.
#
But it is possible to immerse yourself in that effort and give yourself a chance to
#
let that full picture fly past you, if nothing else, so that every once in a while you see
#
one piece of it and you say, I can hear something that I can do personally, because either I
#
know how to make that connection or somebody in this ecosystem knows how to make this connection.
#
So this morning, for example, I talked to someone who was trying to build a large volunteer
#
So, look, when we are building a really large volunteer organization is to pick a first
#
problem for which people are naturally inclined to volunteer anyway.
#
And COVID is, frankly, a great jumping off point, if that's your goal.
#
And so you say, okay, you're trying to build a national volunteer organization.
#
COVID or no COVID, that's what you're trying to do.
#
Here's a way of getting that started.
#
Do this first for COVID relief, right?
#
And if you're interested, their goal now marries with the immediate goal of providing relief
#
So you have to find the pieces that are naturally inclined to do something that forms part of
#
the total picture anyway, and get them neatly hooked into something that they can do immediately
#
in a way that provides strength to the immediate effort and actually gives them a greater chance
#
of doing what they want to do in the long run.
#
If you put that exercise off, you can build the channels much faster.
#
So in the context of COVID, you've laid out a very fascinating look at all the different
#
categories of people who are helping, whether it's development sector, whether it's large
#
donors, whether it's individuals and corporations, middle management, who can leverage capacities
#
in their companies besides contributing individually, it's business owners, it's a government, it's
#
And equally, these are the people who are doing something.
#
And there are many people who you're saying are outside of this, who are not really doing
#
You know, before we go into the weeds, and I want to kind of spend the rest of the episode
#
in the weeds with you talking about specifics and particulars, I first want to kind of ask
#
a general question, which is sparked by something you said earlier, when you know, you were
#
speaking about how you don't believe that how there are people who are inclined to help
#
and they will help anyway, but many people may not change their approach to helping.
#
Now, I was looking back at some of the writing I had done during a previous natural disaster,
#
which was a tsunami in 2004 at the end of 2004.
#
And at that time, I traveled across the coast of Tamil Nadu with a friend of mine after
#
it happened with a bunch of friends, we'd gone with a group trying to help out and I
#
was kind of live blogging from there.
#
I was calling my series Dispatches the way Michael Hur called his Vietnam thing Dispatches.
#
And my Dispatch number 36 is titled the broader continuing disaster.
#
And my main point there was that, look, this is a disaster, the tsunami is a disaster.
#
But a lot of the things that we are trying to sort of help out with our problems that
#
have been with us forever, for example, cyclone just at Bombay, right?
#
Now a cyclone will come, it will make some people homeless and immediately there'll be
#
relief for the homeless people.
#
But the point is millions of Indians are homeless anyway.
#
For example, a migrant labor crisis will happen when the lockdown is called.
#
And some really fine people will go out there sort of feeding people.
#
But the point is that we've always had problem of hunger.
#
In fact, we still do like in a column I wrote last year, I pointed out a 3000 children die
#
every day in India from starvation one in four Indian children are malnourished.
#
My point being that we notice these things, the homelessness, the deaths, the hunger,
#
when there is something like COVID-19 or something like a tsunami or something like a cyclone
#
approximate event brings it into relief.
#
But these have always been with us.
#
And I have some questions here.
#
And one of my questions is that, could we then say that by and large, the apathy that
#
most people display towards this is a natural defense mechanism?
#
Because most of us will think that, hey, I can't do something about such a big problem
#
or I don't want to or hey, screw it, I need to get on with my own life.
#
And therefore, this becomes a defense mechanism.
#
And another added narrative element to the defense mechanism is we rant against the state.
#
We say the state should be doing all of this.
#
Why isn't the state doing anything?
#
And that kind of becomes an approach that keeps us trapped in apathy.
#
Like even now, I see many people like yourself and your colleagues like Ruben Mascarenas
#
and so on who are out there every day, obsessed with helping others.
#
And I see a lot of people just outraging on social media, but not actually doing anything
#
And I don't want this just to be a rant, but I just wonder, for example, there's almost
#
an ecosystem of relief that has happened, partly including people who were doing things
#
to help society before, partly including a lot of people who weren't, who now suddenly
#
see the pain around them, feel the loss, and they say, hey, I want to help, I want to donate,
#
I want to organize something, I want to do this.
#
How much of that will remain after this pandemic?
#
What is it that needs to be done for people to realize that, shit, this has caused a lot
#
of pain, but we live with a lot of pain on a daily basis.
#
3,000 people dying every day of starvation is, how is it not comparable with the people
#
who are dying of COVID?
#
That's a solvable problem.
#
And you can't just take the cop out and say that, hey, the state has failed us, which
#
But like in my last episode with Karthik, for example, we had that discussion on my
#
growing feeling that we cannot depend just on the state, I'm okay that we should try
#
to work with the state, we should be stakeholders.
#
But a lot of these solutions have to come from private people just going out there and
#
saying that there are problems, I want to solve them.
#
Whether you're doing it in a nonprofit way or whether some of these problems you say
#
that I will build a business out of it, but there are problems that need to be solved.
#
What is your sort of thinking on all of this and is it something that has evolved or gained
#
detail over the last few months?
#
It is a defense mechanism, but it's not a natural defense mechanism.
#
So I'd make that distinction first.
#
It's a cultivated defense mechanism.
#
And really, to understand it correctly, in my mind, at least, you have to ask yourself,
#
what is the difference between a community and a campus?
#
If you answer that question, you will be able to figure out the rest of it easily.
#
Every community is a campus, but not every campus is a community, right?
#
People will say in my apartment community or in my whatever, office community, a lot
#
of the things that we call communities are only campuses, they're not really communities.
#
Can you define campus for me in this context?
#
Something that has a wall and a gate and a way of living and using it within that space,
#
which is it could be even a BSNL housing society, it could be your apartment community or mine
#
or a corporate office block built by some construction company, it could be any of these
#
If you don't have a natural way of belonging in that space, you can't be there.
#
There are lots of ways of ensuring, in fact, that you are not there.
#
If you want to walk on 25 streets in Bombay or if I want to walk on 50 streets in Bangalore,
#
I really don't need to ask anybody, right?
#
I have a natural way of being there, which is not challenged in any way, right?
#
That doesn't make those people my community, but I'm saying space is one part of understanding
#
the difference between a campus and a community.
#
I mean, think about a community in this way, even in a closed community, somebody has to
#
live on the edge of the community.
#
So let's say you have the plot at the edge of the community or the apartment at the edge
#
What you're really saying is that my neighbor on my left is my neighbor and he's part of
#
My neighbor on my right is not even part of my community.
#
Imagine living on a street of houses, on a public street of houses, and saying the guy
#
on my right is not my neighbor.
#
First of all, it's ridiculous.
#
Second, it's a cultivated thing.
#
It's that wall that's making you think he's not your neighbor.
#
You pay a certain maintenance fee every month, he doesn't do that.
#
You have certain services inside your community that you've organized for yourself, he's not
#
He might in fact be part of another set of such services in his community.
#
So it's not like you're excluding him, you're hoping that he's got his own set up in some
#
But I'm saying there is a cultivated difference, right?
#
So I think earlier also we spoke about this.
#
Everybody has got security guards.
#
What are these security guards doing, right?
#
Poor people are just standing at some stand post, really, and doing some bizarre thing,
#
writing things on notebooks that nobody even looks at.
#
In fact, I've tried one exercise a lot when I get this notification on some app that the
#
community has to say, oh, so-and-so has come to see you.
#
And they let them in anyway.
#
It's a process, somebody has to ask whether this person should be let in, somebody has
#
to note down that there has to be a response, and after that, the person can be let in.
#
Actually, if the response is no, what you should do is not written down anyway in most
#
Maybe in the companies it's a little different because you're going into somebody's office
#
But you can try all these little experiments that teach you that these are processes that
#
exist for the sake of having a process.
#
They have the illusion of a community, they're actually nothing more than some silly campus
#
And Peter Block is the guy who really, in my mind, wrote about this in the most impactful
#
He wrote a book called Community, and the essence of that is that communities work on
#
trust, and they try to enable the gifts of each person in that community.
#
I think Amit Verma is a gift for communication.
#
Whether he's a four-year-old child or a 45-year-old man is not different.
#
With this gift for communication, what can we do that really is powerful for so many
#
other people in this space, whether there's a wall or not a wall, and maybe what can he
#
do even outside this space like you're doing?
#
That's one way of thinking about people.
#
Another way of thinking about people is to out of fear and distrust, that you believe
#
the person who is coming to visit your neighbor in your apartment community could potentially
#
come to your house and rob you, could potentially assault your teenage daughter.
#
You start with believing that, and therefore you say, well, we need a system that protects
#
People have lived on the street for the longest time without that system.
#
People have lived inside houses for the longest time without that system.
#
The system does not come from the security guard or the MyGate application.
#
It actually comes from something else.
#
It's a cultivated way of thinking that fear and distrust are necessary parts of how you
#
respond to large complex problems, which you think you cannot grapple with.
#
You refer to people saying, I can't deal with this.
#
But their response to, I can't deal with this, is sometimes to say, I need somebody to help
#
And they choose the wrong guy.
#
They really should be going to people who teach them how to help build strong communities.
#
They shouldn't be going to people who teach them how to hire security guards.
#
And frankly, those same security guards can be used in very different ways.
#
You teach them to work like an usher.
#
You teach them to work like a receiving agent for materials that need a dispatch in the
#
There are things you can do that give them also more dignity than to just stand around
#
in the sun or in the rain and give them actually some competence that they can take into another
#
job if they want to, that frees them from the bondage into which they have come into
#
your large city from Jharkhand or Orissa or whatever kind of thing.
#
I'm saying we have to think of different groups of people in the society in a way that enables
#
that the guy standing at the gate, he has to be part of your community.
#
How can you say that somebody who is a service provider to your community is not a member
#
I just don't accept that.
#
But we have a cultivated way of coming to this stuff, which is just mind numbing.
#
And I think it's happening in the schools, it's happening in the companies, it's happening
#
in the workplaces in a way that you have to beat this socially.
#
During the previous campaigns, the India Against Corruption campaign or even the election campaigns,
#
I've observed this, but people would say, sir, you can't trust anybody.
#
But if you go and talk to his neighbor, he'll say the same thing.
#
So Amit says he can't trust his neighbor, Amit's neighbor says you can't trust Amit.
#
And the funny part is both Amit and his neighbor will say to me, no, you and I know each other,
#
therefore we can trust each other.
#
You are trustworthy, I know, but my neighbor may not be, and my neighbor also says the
#
Sir, you are trustworthy, you and I, some marriages, but therefore you cannot trust
#
I think we have to crack this in a different way.
#
I remember an old article I wrote about the importance of wanting to do the right thing,
#
even if you can't do it.
#
You ask kids, what do you want to do when you grow up?
#
And every once in a while, there'll be a girl who says, I want to change the world.
#
I think it's important to help young people in particular believe that they should want
#
to change the world for the better.
#
They may not be able to, but I think it's extraordinarily important to teach a child
#
you should change the world for the better, because other people before you have tried
#
to change the world for the better, and you are a beneficiary of that, number one.
#
Second, this is what distinguishes you as a human from many other species that you could
#
And it's a decent thing to do.
#
There's a contractual social arrangement built into this thing.
#
And most importantly, if you believe this, you will spend your life in the company of
#
people that you will respect and people who will inspire you.
#
And I think that's really important.
#
At some level, I mean, I'm much older than when I started doing all this stuff, but at
#
some level, I've always said, I'm a child of the development experience in this country.
#
I have a family because I'm a child of that development experience.
#
And that family includes all sorts of people in the development sector.
#
It includes people like you.
#
It includes people that you come into contact with whose collective intent represents some
#
larger public good, which I may not always be able to contour correctly, but that intent
#
itself nourishes my life.
#
And that intent really can shape a lot of young lives.
#
And I really think that's important to be able to hold on to the idea that to live in
#
an empathetic and decent way is something we should expect of our neighbor, not be content
#
with saying, well, who can believe him or who can trust him?
#
Well, and also I think people would trust each other a little bit more if they just
#
I don't know if I did this seven four-letter words thing with you the last time.
#
I always tell people, go and meet new people, right?
#
And they will say, well, it's not easy to meet new people.
#
There are all kinds of people that you don't know.
#
Just go up to them and say hello.
#
And they think that's really odd.
#
But actually, if you did that for 10 days, it'll stop being odd.
#
And then you'll start to think, why don't I know all these people there around me all
#
This shopkeeper, this laundry man, you know the laundry man who comes to your house.
#
You don't know the laundry man who comes to your neighbor's house.
#
So there's all of these bizarre things that there's a lot of neighborliness without neighborhood.
#
There's a lot of campus without community.
#
It's that small nuance.
#
And it makes all the difference.
#
And even about relief, I've been saying relief is not a logistics problem.
#
Aid is not a logistics issue.
#
You must get in the aid thing because you believe in the fundamental dignity of other
#
people to live in a way that with at least the minimum standard of protection for their
#
lives and livelihoods and to be able to count on each other in times like this.
#
That's why you go and do aid, not because it's technomanagerally needed on the day the
#
pandemic or the cyclone or the tsunami hits you.
#
Incidentally, about the tsunami, one of the very first things I did with Mapunity was
#
mapping out tsunami relief staff.
#
So I remember that starting point quite well.
#
So a lot of strands to pick up from.
#
And first of all, for my listeners, you mentioned all those four letter words.
#
I recommend all the listeners to check out episode 160 of The Scene and the Unseen, which
#
was where Ashwin first appeared and it remains a favorite episode for many people.
#
And the first half of that was not so much about his work, but his philosophy towards
#
And there's a lot that I found very inspiring there.
#
I'll link it from the show notes.
#
I want to go back to what Karthik said in the last episode.
#
You asked me about that.
#
I don't remember the exact question that you asked, but I felt like for part of that conversation,
#
you were continuing a debate that we had in my second episode with you, which was, you
#
know, some people even wrote to me about it and said, I noticed it was quite back and
#
It was really a contrast between two ways of thinking about it.
#
And this whole state, you are the state kind of thing.
#
Let's come to that, I want to respond to what you just said.
#
So before we lose the thread, and then I'll come back to that question.
#
You know, I agree with the conclusion that you came to, which is that we need to beat
#
this socially, this problem of apathy.
#
And I also kind of agree with a lot of your diagnosis, but not with some of the terms.
#
For example, you spoke about how this kind of apathy is cultivated.
#
And I would actually say that it's the opposite, that this apathy is evolved and the way that
#
we beat it, that is what we have to cultivate.
#
For example, you know, evolutionary psychologists will often talk about how there is a circle
#
of 150 people that we can really remember by face, we can't remember more people than
#
So we divide the world into this is our tribe, and everything else is the other, in the sense
#
that our brains evolved in prehistoric times.
#
That is how we are wired to think we are, of course, wired to think in contradictory
#
But this is a core way.
#
A concept that I found that influenced me profoundly came from a book written in I think
#
It's about the history of morals is by W. E. H. Leckie, where he talks about something
#
called the expanding circle.
#
And his point there is that he doesn't pick up on this 150 people concept, but he says
#
that, look, who are the people we consider worthy of a moral consideration, initially,
#
it is a very small circle, maybe it's just a family, then it expands to our tribe.
#
And initially, it's very few people because our brains have evolved in times of scarcity,
#
you know, daily survival is almost like a zero sum fight with others.
#
But gradually, as society evolves, and it's no longer zero sum, from your family, your
#
circle will expand to maybe your tribe, then maybe your neighborhood, it will become a
#
country, it will become your people, your race, your species.
#
And Leckie's point was that through history, we found that circle moving to a point that,
#
you know, for many people, it includes all human beings.
#
And Peter Singer, I think, wrote a book called The Utilitarian Philosopher, who was also
#
an animal rights activist, wrote a book called The Expanding Circle, in fact, I think, where
#
his argument was that one day the circle will expand enough to include animals in it, which
#
is actually a powerful argument, I don't see why not.
#
And we could easily, you know, three centuries later be judging all the people who live today,
#
saying that, oh, my God, what savages ate meat in the same way that, you know, people
#
today will judge people two centuries ago and say, oh, my God, they had slaves, women
#
So a circle is expanding.
#
And this is a good thing.
#
But my argument would be that what is natural to us, what has evolved is this sense of dividing
#
the world into us versus the other.
#
And what has been cultivated perhaps since the Enlightenment in an organized way is this
#
sense that, no, the circle is expanding.
#
And in a sense, we are fighting this sort of tribalistic hardwiring.
#
And one modern problem that we face is that a lot of our politics is going straight into
#
that old hardwiring that we are trying to fight, where a lot of our politics is thinking
#
in tribalistic terms, is painting others.
#
Like the German political theorist Karl Schmidt spoke about how to be successful in politics,
#
you need to have an enemy or you need to construct an enemy.
#
There is no politics without an enemy.
#
And this seems to feed again to that tribal instinct.
#
And even within this pandemic, instead of all of us are united by our suffering, by
#
what we are going through, and yet you still see the same political tropes happen where
#
one side will take one narrative line, another side will take another narrative line.
#
But my point is the same as yours, that we need to continue the cultivation of the expansion
#
of that circle, that expanding circle we needed to expand.
#
And that, to me, is a social battle more than anything else.
#
So one, do you have any thoughts to add to this?
#
And two, we can then move on to the question I asked about the state versus, you know,
#
that we need to not do the cop-out of saying the state will do it or we need to work with
#
the state, but actually say that, look, we've got to get down and dirty much as you are
#
and we need to solve these problems ourselves.
#
I mean, there's a temporal element to it.
#
I promised myself I wouldn't talk like Karthik.
#
So let me tell you what I mean.
#
I mean, the guy is great.
#
He can use words with such precise meanings at breakneck speed without making even a mistake
#
I can't even believe that.
#
But to come back to it, what do I mean is this expanding circle thing is not a sequence.
#
I care about my children because they are my children.
#
But it is possible at the same time to care about children because they are children too.
#
They're just not my children.
#
In fact, if you didn't know in the universe of children which child was yours, you would
#
actually have a very different way of treating children.
#
I think what you're saying and all these philosophers have been saying is that knowing who is your
#
child, who is your brother, who is your neighbor, itself has a certain boundary in how you behave.
#
And then you start to say, therefore, I behave in a certain way inside this boundary, in
#
a certain way outside that boundary.
#
And maybe this campus is just a reflection of that.
#
But I actually think the way to beat that is not to say, let's all build 10 campuses
#
And then we'll figure out how to transact and interact across boundaries.
#
But I think it's not that necessary to tell you the truth.
#
You could say, because I care about my children anyway, there's no reason not to care about
#
other children also now.
#
Even if you thought about a sequence, you already care about your children.
#
So what does sequence mean at that point?
#
So you ought to be caring about all children now.
#
You may not be able to do all things for all children, like you would for your own.
#
But I think there is a reasonable way of saying, even if I have these boundaries, these boundaries
#
If there is a boundary, it's the boundary of my capacity.
#
It's not the boundary of my empathy.
#
It's not the boundary of my preferred intent for why I live the way I do.
#
But I think it is possible for people to say that.
#
And they will still have the boundaries that come from capacity.
#
You can't do everything.
#
In fact, that's just reality.
#
But also, I think there's a way to think of this, which is just that little bit.
#
It's like watching the tail of a tiger when you're walking in a forest behind a tree.
#
You see the tail of the tiger, and you ask yourself, what should I think now?
#
That the rest of the tiger is attached to it, or that this is some discarded tail from
#
You can think all sorts of things.
#
Francis Crick wrote a book about all this stuff.
#
It's called The Astonishing Hypothesis.
#
We should talk about that someday.
#
I think there's a lot that we don't see, and that's really the point.
#
We believe what we see actually can mean lots of things.
#
We believe what the brain is telling us about what we see.
#
We believe it only when we see it.
#
But we believe it when we hear it from other people.
#
Hearing it is actually a kind of seeing it, if you hear it from trusted sources.
#
So there's lots of these kinds of nuances.
#
I think it's possible to treat this boundary that you're referring to, the circle, wherever
#
If that circle is a circle of capacity rather than a circle of intent, there's nothing wrong
#
But if it's a circle of intent, then there's a problem.
#
Moving on now to Karthik's questions, I mean, or what I discussed with him, where I don't
#
want to take the stand that the state has no role to play.
#
I mean, of course it does.
#
We know what it should do.
#
And it's failed in many of them and we should work with the state to make it work.
#
But the sense increasingly grows upon me that at some point we can't just say that the solution
#
You know, we have to step up.
#
We have to try to solve these problems ourselves.
#
I mean, and it goes to this idea of you are the state that, you know, I had chats with
#
you about and Karthik sort of, I think he's starting to lean that way a little bit as
#
Karthik, I don't mean to dismiss what you said earlier, which is, hey, I've done my
#
part of what I should be doing.
#
I certainly have cared about lots of people.
#
I've done what I could in my spheres of influence.
#
I've even paid my taxes on top of that.
#
So the state, I have a reasonable right to expect the state should do its job.
#
I think the state should do its job.
#
I believe the state should do its job.
#
It does have a capacity problem in addition to everything else that is true.
#
And then actually, if I help the state do its job, it would be easier for me to demand
#
Today, there's a lot of people who don't help the state do its job.
#
That's one of the reasons why they're not able to demand that the state should do the
#
That is the socio-political element.
#
What I mean, I'll give you a transactional example, right?
#
What I mean by a transactional example is what you are aware of some problem.
#
There is an engineer or a public health official or somebody in the state who should do something
#
One very small part of moving that line is to draw the attention of that person to something
#
If a water main breaks on your street, yeah, you could say the state should be putting
#
detection technologies and IOTS platforms everywhere to figure out if the water main
#
is breaking and having a dashboard from which they can tell that.
#
But even before these things became possible, somehow somebody in the state needs to know
#
that this water main has broken.
#
If it's not the water, you can't put IOTS things on everything, right?
#
There is an element of knowing, and the element of knowing that is possible from the population
#
itself at large can never be mimicked by the state.
#
There are just too many things that can go wrong that nobody can actually mimic that.
#
No state can mimic that.
#
The velocity of the state's response depends on the state getting to know these things,
#
also among other things, right?
#
If you know the state, you can solve that part with a puzzle.
#
I know my local best com engineer, my BWSSB water manager, some five, six guys like that.
#
If I see something wrong, even if it's not actually in my house, I'm driving down the
#
street, I'm walking down the street, I see something wrong, I could call the guy up and
#
say do something about it.
#
You could say he might do something about it because I'm calling him, but you could
#
also say he's doing something about it because that's the first time he's hearing about it.
#
He's operating in a world that he doesn't really have knowledge of.
#
I think there are elements of what you are seeing which are certainly true, but there
#
are also elements of what I'm saying that are necessary.
#
That is, after I have told him that there is something wrong, that he should do something
#
about it, I'm actually in a much better position to say I told you, why the hell didn't you
#
Whereas the guys who are completely outside the system, it is true that they don't bring
#
it to the attention of the system, but they also don't have the ability, the capacity
#
to ask that second question.
#
I think if our expectation is that the state should deliver on the things that we expect
#
from it, I think that expectation is actually benefited by my assisting the state.
#
It's not substituted by my assisting the state.
#
It's a debatable point.
#
I'm sure you can think of seven examples of that, but I'm saying there is an element
#
We've debated this in our previous episode, so I'll just direct the listeners to that.
#
I won't go back to that, but a quick kind of example comes to mind illustrating what
#
First of all, my fundamental point is that, look, the whole point of the state being there
#
is that there are certain things I should be able to rely on it to do.
#
That's why I pay my taxes, that I don't want to have to go and do the rule of law myself.
#
I don't have to go and do the drainage myself.
#
I buy your point that if my drainage is overflowing outside my house, I have to first bring it
#
Their attention as a citizen, that I have to do, but if they're not fixing it for many
#
days and people are falling ill, then at some point I have to say that, okay, me and my
#
immediate neighbors need to sort this out because it's affecting us.
#
The other kind of thought that strikes me is let's do a thought experiment.
#
Let's say that from where I am sitting, I can look outside and I can see that someone
#
is beating a little girl on the road.
#
Now the first informational thing about, I mean, the state can't be everywhere.
#
So one thing I could do is let the state know, call the cop and immediately tell him.
#
That's obviously not all.
#
What I should do is I should go out there myself and I should stop that immediate beating
#
The other question that then comes up is what if the person doing the beating is the state?
#
What if it is a policeman who's beating a little girl, which is kind of a separate problem,
#
but a relevant one in terms of COVID as well, because in terms of misinformation and a lot
#
of the things that the state has done in terms of getting in the way of private enterprise,
#
it's not just sins of omission.
#
There are sins of commission as well.
#
And I've done an episode with Jason Brennan, the philosopher on that, about that if the
#
state does something wrong, does it have some extra leeway or is it is wrong, wrong?
#
And I agree with him that wrong is wrong, regardless of who does it.
#
But that's a separate issue.
#
I just think that there are certain moments where individuals have to come in.
#
And we'll drill a little bit deeper in that in the context of COVID because I'm certain
#
that a lot of the things that are wrong with health care today or wrong with the kind of
#
lives which people live in the context of how healthy they are and how they take care
#
of it, a lot of it simply cannot be solved by the state because capacity issues to begin
#
Let's leave the other structural issues out of the way.
#
Let's move on to the immediate now to the main subject of this episode.
#
And I think a simple way to sort of dive into it rather than just talk at the level of ideas
#
is a chronological sense.
#
Like I did an episode with your colleague, Ruben Mascarenas, who did such amazing work
#
last year during the lockdown when the migrant labour crisis happened and he and his group
#
Khaana Chahiye went around and fed so many people.
#
And Ruben in his individual capacity in the second wave has been helping people with beds
#
and medicines and all of that.
#
And Khaana Chahiye have also started an oxygen ambulance thing, all of which is incredible.
#
And I know that you're involved at a socio-political level in getting things done at the level
#
We've discussed that in detail in the last two episodes.
#
But in terms of immediate COVID relief, I think the easiest way to dive in is through
#
Chronology, where, tell me a little bit about how your kind of thinking about this began.
#
What are the moments where you began to say, no, I got to do something here, I got to do
#
something here and here and here.
#
And how does your vision deepen, therefore equally at the same time, how does your spheres
#
So it doesn't begin like that.
#
Because if you take the Khaana Chahiye example itself, yes, Neeraj and Ruben and all those
#
guys did extraordinary stuff on the ground.
#
But what happens is when you start to do that kind of stuff, you say, we need to raise more
#
money, for example, or we can't really see this properly, we're not able to present it
#
to the municipal corporation in a way that convinces them that they should be looking
#
at it in a different way.
#
So typically what will happen, you're trying to solve that problem.
#
Someone will call you and say, can you help a little bit round up some more money to feed
#
Can you already help map all these things so that we can actually look at it on a spatial
#
Do you have a tool that will help us gather this information?
#
Because you have volunteers on the ground doing 27 different things, they're all related
#
activity but you don't have a way to gather them.
#
So what happens is that your first involvement with any problem is techno-managing it.
#
But it is happening in a world that is already socio-political.
#
The Ruben Mascarenes of the world are already my friends, already my allies, already my
#
whatever, family, extended family in some way.
#
So you're only asking questions within that family.
#
So for you, the question doesn't come to you as something that creates a tipping point.
#
It comes to you as something that creates capacity first.
#
We can do more of this if all of us pull together.
#
And this is the same thing, even if you look at COVID, the first set of things don't come
#
to you as in this way of deciding that we must do something.
#
You never actually make that decision.
#
You come to that point because you are transactionally, and what I mean by that is at an activity
#
level involved in the bits and pieces of that response, whether inside the state or outside
#
the state, whether through technology or not, in all sorts of ways.
#
Somebody needs to get something delivered in Chitradurga.
#
So people say, you know what, let me ask Kashmir, he's bound to know somebody in Chitradurga.
#
So I'm asking somebody in Chitradurga, there's some medicine that needs to reach some family,
#
there's some difficulty in getting this delivered.
#
You know Chitradurga well, help this guy, get this delivered.
#
So it's transactional, it's activity at that level.
#
But in the process of doing that, you are now in the medical relief supply chain in
#
And then you recognize patterns in it.
#
You say, oh, I did this in Chitradurga yesterday, I'm doing this in Anikkal today, I'm doing
#
this in Karwar tomorrow.
#
And then you start to tell yourself, this is not going to scale if we do it like this.
#
We need somebody in the system who can take all these requests, contact all the people
#
that we know in all of these different geographies, and build velocity to be able to respond to
#
And if there's one thing that distinguishes how we have set about doing relief work in
#
this particular ecosystem, and this is not just a development family ecosystem, I'm going
#
In this approach, you can round up participation from all sorts of people in all those buckets
#
that I listed earlier, the corporate guys, the jet roofs, even the CSR guys, and even
#
the industrialists and the big donors.
#
You can round up all this.
#
But the thing that rounds them up is this notion of expanding capacity.
#
That it can be done, I can do it, I know other people that can do it.
#
Therefore, if you have additional capacity, it's natural that other people come to it.
#
And I feel building it in this way has been useful, because it has left a large number
#
of people with the impression that you can actually do this differently.
#
I said this a couple of days ago on social media, and a lot of people sort of wrote back
#
Every state has a government-to-people response to the pandemic, the government is doing something.
#
You may not always agree with what they're doing, or you may not always think it's enough,
#
but they're doing something.
#
No government is doing nothing.
#
I mean, no government is doing even a half-baked job, if you ask me, they're doing something.
#
The state governments, I make a distinction between government at various levels.
#
No, and then in many places, there is also businesses and large people with the capacity
#
to help doing something, because the governments have reached out to them, or they themselves
#
had those connections anyway, and they're helping in some way.
#
I think what we've set out to try in Karnataka is distinguished by two other things.
#
We're doing a people-to-state program.
#
We're saying we're going to round up people to help the government, right?
#
It's not a philosophical thing, it's not a positional thing, it's just basically that's
#
what we're going to add this piece.
#
The people are going to help the government, that's number one, and the fourth piece is
#
the people are going to help each other, not in this neighborly scale of I can do it in
#
my neighborhood kind of thing, the people are, I living in the southeastern corner of
#
the state, accept responsibility for every last person living within the state's boundary
#
And therefore, this people-to-people thing has great potential, because now you're saying,
#
let us all of us together in this state build these two additional capacities, the people-to-government
#
capacity and the people-to-people capacity, and I genuinely believe that the velocity
#
of the response depends on these two things for a very simple reason.
#
There are lots of people.
#
The Sarkar has few people, businesses have even fewer people, communities don't even
#
have what most businesses do, but the general population, you can never out-compete the
#
general population for sheer numbers, right?
#
So the question is, can you tap into the general population?
#
Can you build a response strategy that taps for sheer volume into that general population?
#
If you build that strategy, it's effectively, then you're at war with the virus, everybody
#
It's like a war at that point, and the virus is everywhere, you have to be everywhere too.
#
So that's fascinating that there are different sort of questions that come to mind based
#
on this, and I'll quickly outline them and then you can kind of go through them one by
#
Like one aspect of this, of course, is that you're saying there's a proximate problem,
#
Somewhere people can't get food, they're getting food, somewhere somebody is not getting some
#
medicine, you can help them get medicine.
#
Now initially you obviously begin by solving the proximate problems in a piecemeal way,
#
that you call up your friend and Chitradurga and you say, hey, can you get medicine to
#
Then you realize, no, let's scale it.
#
Let's build a system of response that is scalable.
#
So now what you're doing is you're scaling a system of responding to these proximate
#
Now, the other thought that comes up here is that these are proximate problems that
#
are really symptoms of a deeper problem, like if there are scarcities of medicines or if
#
there was a scarcity of oxygen, for example, in so many places in the country, why is that
#
What is the problem with migrant labor that they suffer such incredible shocks in terms
#
of not even being able to feed themselves when something goes wrong?
#
And there are deeper structural problems with that.
#
And part of the question is identifying those problems and saying, hey, in the long term,
#
we've got to solve those problems.
#
And my intermediate question sort of is that while scaling up your response to the proximate
#
problems, and I'll ask you to kind of go into the concrete details of that because I find
#
that really fascinating.
#
But while saying that we want to now scale it up so that we can get oxygen to wherever
#
is required, we can get food to wherever is required, you scale that up.
#
But how much of that infrastructure or that ecosystem that you've built to tackle these
#
proximate problems is something that then is relevant for the future?
#
Like are we always going to fight symptoms or are these things that we've set up also
#
useful in fighting the sort of bigger problems?
#
And I've kind of stated my whole set of questions here, but I'm happy if you kind of take them
#
Like first of all, do you agree with the characterizations that there are these proximate problems and
#
then there are bigger structural issues that are with us forever?
#
And the proximate problem tomorrow in the next crisis might be some other different
#
detail, but the structural issues are the same.
#
And moving on from that, maybe we can talk about how you set about scaling the response,
#
So I'll start with this last question, because frankly, it answers most of the others leading
#
You're essentially leading up to a question.
#
And if I answer that question, the rest of the question, the stuff is built into the
#
One is that the very act of involving lots more people in a transactional response also
#
gives you the potential to call upon a much larger ecosystem for more things in the future.
#
Because I know people in Chitradurga, as a result of doing what we are doing now, I can
#
do something in Chitradurga all the time in the future.
#
Not always at this intensity, not always at this scale.
#
And it's not just me, right?
#
It's hundreds of people, thousands of people now know each other in multiple geographies.
#
And sometimes it's multiple geographies, even in their own cities, in large cities, that's
#
So the very act of constructing the response in this way builds one part of the social
#
capacity for responding to further things.
#
The things that they respond to in the future need not be pandemics and catastrophes, it
#
could be ongoing baseline problems.
#
So that's one part of it, that 10 people who know each other because they came together
#
in this way, now have the capacity to do slightly more because they know slightly more.
#
So I give you this example.
#
Let's say I do something with Urban Clap and we'd set up some kind of infrastructure mechanics
#
training program or service system for public hospitals as a result of that.
#
The reality is that the result of having had that connection and that experience is that
#
tomorrow you can say, look, what are the potential of this for some other problem that you want
#
So that, I think, is one part of it.
#
The second part of it is, I think, velocity, right, and make a distinction between velocity
#
A lot of things can be done with speed, and governments sometimes have been doing lots
#
of things in the wrong direction, and therefore all the speed in the world is not going to
#
help governments that do those things in the wrong direction, right?
#
So velocity is important, and velocity is better informed by visibility to the outcome.
#
And that visibility to the outcome really depends on having multiple eyes and ears in
#
So I think that's also a lasting thing.
#
But the third thing is also important.
#
The question that you're asking is nonetheless important.
#
If you take all of the things that you want to do and do it only in this transactional
#
way, yes, there is some ongoing social value because of the connections that evolve, but
#
Which is why, in my conversations in particular with the donor community, the thing that I
#
have been saying is, let's break this down into all the things that need to be done.
#
And I'll send you that list.
#
I don't even mind if you put that on your show notes or something.
#
Here are the seven or eight things that need to be done.
#
This is what needs to be done in terms of in-hospital infrastructure.
#
This is what needs to be done in terms of long-term care, post-care COVID.
#
This is what needs to be done in terms of testing.
#
This is what needs to be done in terms of genome sequencing.
#
This is what needs to be done in terms of ensuring continuing oxygen supply.
#
This is what needs to be done in terms of ensuring production of oxygen-sensitizing
#
This is what needs to be done to get the vaccine production things.
#
So if you can direct the donor money in particular to things that create greater internal capacity,
#
it's actually, it's a kind of make in India, if you think about it.
#
And I think that's important.
#
Actually, make in India has always been important.
#
It's just that the Sarkari definition of make in India has no place for sell in India.
#
In fact, if you allow people to sell in India, they would make in India.
#
Anything that you allow to sell in India, people will eventually make in India.
#
There are one billion people here who can buy it.
#
Who wouldn't want to make it if they were allowed to sell it?
#
It's because you don't allow them to sell it that they don't make it here.
#
In some way, if you get this capacity for consumption going, you can actually crack
#
a lot of other problems.
#
So that's a lasting outcome that the money in particular can enable.
#
And even the relationships with governments at different levels are things that you can
#
So I think if you construct the response in a way that is people to people, people to
#
government, then what happens, and I would even go so far as to say that some of the
#
donor money is aligning to this approach, precisely because it now sees this as having
#
lost potential lasting value, not proven lasting value, I'll be the first to concede that.
#
But certainly, if you do this through this channel in certain neighborhoods with local
#
awareness, there's a much greater sense that these things are being used properly.
#
And the guy's writing checks, not just the big donors.
#
The guy's writing even CSR checks, want to be assured that their money is being used
#
Who can provide that assurance better than a consumer of the actual thing that if you're
#
putting up an oxygen plant in Chitradurga, well, you'd like somebody in Chitradurga
#
other than the divisional commissioner to sign off on that.
#
So I'll get you that connect.
#
And then you as the guy who actually gave that plant can have that connect directly.
#
So in a way, I think these are the ways to construct that lasting thing.
#
But I will also concede that these don't naturally lead to asking how can you do this in housing
#
and how can you do this in water supply and sanitation and all of that, and education
#
It doesn't naturally lead to that.
#
But it gives you a larger number of connections to tap into.
#
And if you choose to, you can begin to ask that question too.
#
Even in this thing itself, I've had in the middle of a conversation about the response
#
to a pandemic, there have been people who say, I should separately I want to talk to
#
you about what we're doing in education.
#
And I've said separately for now means temporarily.
#
Separately means four weeks later when actually when you're out of this stuff.
#
But clearly it's happening.
#
People who are talking to me about delivering oxygen concentrators are saying, I want to
#
show you what we're doing in this or that.
#
And I'm sure they're saying that to many others in that conversation as well.
#
If you want to be deliberate about that, you can do that.
#
I started working with people who finally, for the first time in India, we are seeing
#
the emergence of a built to rent market for housing.
#
Almost all housing in this India is built to sell.
#
We've never had built to rent market.
#
The emergence of a built to rent market has great potential for tackling the affordable
#
So now I know what to do with that if I have bandwidth for that.
#
And the way to construct bandwidth is to tap into this large ecosystem and say, three guys
#
from that chase this problem.
#
It's an interesting thing.
#
Certainly what you're raising is an important thing, but I think there's a way to be deliberate
#
No, no, I agree with you entirely.
#
In my question, I didn't want there to be an implication that I'm minimizing the importance
#
of solving the proximate problems.
#
And I just think that, like you said, that the long term effects, the unseen effects
#
as it were of building these networks and having people with good intent and a lot of
#
money actually get to know each other and all of that, I think the spin off effects
#
And maybe in the future we'll solve some of our deeper problems.
#
And speaking of deeper, we got to get deeper into many of the concrete things that you've
#
But before that, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
And on the other side of it, we'll get down to brass tacks.
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and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
#
Welcome back to the scene and the unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Ashwin Mahesh about COVID-19 and relief operations around COVID-19 with
#
so many people surrounded by the pain and misfortune that they saw all around them and
#
often experienced, stepped in to actually help in whatever way they could.
#
But before we get there, Ashwin wants to talk a little bit about how we talk to each other,
#
like not in the general idea sense of how we talk to each other, communication has changed
#
and all that, but down and dirty talk about apps.
#
He has, Ashwin, I am told has become a fan of Telegram, which he forced me to download
#
a coercive measure, I did not resist, surprise, surprise.
#
So Ashwin, tell us about Telegram and what's so special about it.
#
Well, you know, everybody has WhatsApp, right?
#
So that's what the general population is like.
#
Everybody has WhatsApp.
#
Some people also have Telegram and some people also have Signal.
#
They have it for a variety of reasons, but some people also have Telegram.
#
In the development community, Telegram is more common, simply because it's a way of
#
separating certain conversations from the rest of the thing.
#
And I'm sure I've seen this even with the bureaucracy, the Telegram or Signal is a channel
#
in which they communicate among each other.
#
And remember what I said about people do care, but they have a baseline of caring that is
#
proximate and then there is a stuff that is above and beyond that that they can get into.
#
So the people who can get into the other realm are the guys who will say, if you send them
#
and download Telegram, they'll do it, right?
#
And it's not coercive, I mean, but they see the point.
#
So one of the interesting things that has happened in the last two weeks is that a large
#
number of my contacts and networks and lots of other people are now on Telegram.
#
And the reason they're on Telegram is that the relief effort is running on Telegram in
#
I mean, at least the ones that I have great visibility into, the stronger ones are all
#
And every once in a while, people will ask me, what's your WhatsApp number?
#
I said, well, I don't have WhatsApp.
#
So I said, this is not for me.
#
So I don't have a WhatsApp number.
#
And people kind of find that odd.
#
How can you not have a WhatsApp number?
#
I said, why should it be odd?
#
Because I never ask you for your Outlook ID or your Gmail ID.
#
I ask you for your email ID.
#
And you can ask me if I have a messaging application and I can tell you that they don't have interoperability.
#
So you're asking about individual ones.
#
But in general, I've got Telegram, I've got Signal, I've got Skype, I've got a few other
#
things, but I don't have WhatsApp.
#
And what has been interesting is that all these people at various levels in the last
#
few days have heard people say, oh, you have Telegram.
#
I mean, I've heard about it.
#
I know it's like a development.
#
It's like Mozilla for the messaging world.
#
And more and more people are getting onto it.
#
And that's really what's happened.
#
And then there's a set of people who've never had WhatsApp.
#
And those are extremes.
#
But there's also a set of people who, even after they've heard about Telegram, are not
#
They know that Telegram is developed by a Mozilla-like community.
#
Actually, their goal as a community is partly to build a certain kind of technology with
#
certain values built into it.
#
And these values are different from what a Facebook or a Jack Ma would build into their
#
But they still think, yeah, but I really want to be able to talk to lots of people because
#
lots of people have WhatsApp.
#
I know I want to have WhatsApp.
#
And I can't have more than one app, therefore, really, I want to have WhatsApp.
#
And really, that's the analogy that I see.
#
There's a general population.
#
There is a tippable population.
#
There's an extreme population that didn't even need tipping because they've grown up
#
And then there's a large distributions around the median of each of these kinds of things.
#
And definitely what I'm seeing in the last two weeks is a significant number of people
#
getting onto Telegram for the first time and joining lots and lots of groups on that.
#
So it was kind of in my mind a kind of analogy to what you see in the larger space as well.
#
And every day, I sort of encounter people making these choices for the first time.
#
It's not about Telegram joining the larger relief effort for the first time.
#
It's the first time they've been tipped over into joining this community.
#
It's kind of interesting to see how enthusiastic they are about it and how they jump into connecting
#
in ways that they always knew were possible.
#
But it's now real for them that they've actually tried it.
#
Okay, now we can sort of continue with that.
#
Yeah, no, I'll just kind of quickly respond to this and say that I don't know how permanent
#
this is because a while back, there was this move where everybody wanted to move from WhatsApp
#
and I downloaded Signal for that.
#
So I face this dilemma that I run this online writing course and I'm now in my 13th month.
#
I started it last year when lockdown began and I've had more than like 1100 students
#
so far and out of which about 650 are part of this writing community that kind of continued
#
and it's a volunteer community.
#
They give each other prompts.
#
There are reading groups for fiction and nonfiction.
#
A lot of stuff is happening and it's completely free of charge for everyone who's done the
#
So it's about 650 people.
#
Now, the big limitation is how do we talk?
#
Your email is like your home base, but WhatsApp is where most of the chatter takes place,
#
but they have a limit of 256 people per group.
#
So the 256 who happen to be on are talking all the time.
#
There are like 200 messages a day.
#
They're discussing writing.
#
But how do you involve everyone?
#
And we've tried experiments like one medium that I really would like to make ubiquitous
#
for the group is Discord, which is also a way through which creators stay in touch with
#
And I love it because you can do little audio rooms there.
#
You can do presentations there.
#
You can have Zoomish kind of sessions there.
#
It's really an interesting space.
#
You know, I stopped using Signal after I downloaded it and went on for a bit and I probably won't
#
And part of the reason is that network effects, right?
#
You will just end up having more people available to you on WhatsApp.
#
Although I exited a whole bunch of groups because, you know, a lot of WhatsApp groups,
#
if they're not family WhatsApp groups, which are just sending forwards all the time also
#
disintegrate into kind of shitting on other people, you know, and nothing productive at
#
And people just do that the whole freaking day.
#
You're gossiping about people who aren't there and which, you know, in a sense also happens
#
on parts of social media, which I just hate.
#
But anyway, that aside apart, I mean, I don't know who will give us relief from that.
#
But I'm not as optimistic as you are about Telegram because I know that I got on because
#
you asked me to get on, but I don't think I'll stay on to be very honest because mental
#
bandwidth is limited, which is another reason enough people don't participate in relief.
#
Like over here they may be because everything seems so urgent.
#
But once this has receded, then the old normal will be the new normal again.
#
But I hope there are some changes which linger on.
#
But I think listeners must now be a little exasperated that yeh log bahut high level
#
Let's talk about COVID relief.
#
So there are like I sent you that spectrum of things that need to be looked at or that
#
covers, you know, a very large number of things, but let's start with the stuff that is needed
#
You've got a situation on the ground in which decades of deficit in health infrastructure.
#
Let's focus on health infrastructure.
#
Decades of deficit in health infrastructure and weaknesses in how quickly government can
#
do anything have led to a situation where the virus has overwhelmed you.
#
You don't have 2x demand in any facility, you have 10x demand, 20x demand in many facilities.
#
So the immediate requirement is start building that infrastructure back up as quickly as
#
possible and you identify all the pieces of that infrastructure.
#
You know, frankly, I'd never heard of like PSA plants and oxygen cylinders and all of
#
these kinds of things being used in hospital environment, but it is what it is.
#
You make a list of all the stuff.
#
You figure out who has what, you figure out who doesn't have what, which is actually a
#
much longer list and you say, okay, look, there's no way you can meet this demand, but
#
you start to pick places where you feel you can deliver some of these things reasonably
#
quickly because you know where they are available.
#
You know donors who are willing to pay for it and you know if you can connect the dots
#
between all of them, stuff will get moving on the ground.
#
Of course, in due course, large donors will buy even more of this.
#
So the first thing you do is you start the supply chain in some way.
#
You enable the supply chain to say, we're not going to buy, but we'll help you buy.
#
You don't know anything about cylinders.
#
But because we have helped so many people buy cylinders, we know something about cylinders
#
and we know what to ask and how to negotiate and all of that stuff.
#
You don't know anything about the government, but because we talk to the government all
#
the time, we have some idea of who's asking for what from every district.
#
I have a long list of requirements from every district commissioner.
#
So we'll do the best we can in matching money, materials and need.
#
So you start that relay and you do it for various product lines, oxygen cylinders, concentrators,
#
and 95 masks, whatever, some seven or eight things like that are there.
#
You run that thing for as many product lines as you can.
#
And you say, now I've got a functioning procurement channel.
#
It's actually interesting.
#
It's a channel in which you don't do anything, but other than enable the channel, everybody
#
else does what they are individually.
#
The donor gives money, the manufacturer makes the product, the public administration receives
#
You don't do anything, but you are present everywhere.
#
You are present in the conversation with the donor.
#
You are present in the premises of the manufacturer to check out what the hell that guy is doing
#
because you can't really start sending this stuff before you understand what on earth
#
And you are present in the local office of the DC or the Taluk hospital where the thing
#
is actually being handed over.
#
And so you have that, you build this thing.
#
And after a while, people start to figure out if you are not working with one of the
#
large procurers, there is actually only one way to get materials to happen.
#
Either you must know somebody personally who on a private basis can do something, or you
#
have to reach out to a channel which is enabling this and say, enable my need also.
#
So we started getting requests from other states.
#
So Tamil Nadu will say, can you do this for us too?
#
Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, various states start to say, can you do this for us too?
#
And we usually say, if you have some people on the ground who will also participate in
#
this exercise and who will also help us identify more places from which procurement can happen
#
and more donors who will cough up money for all of these kinds of things, we will keep
#
adding the volunteer teams that will carry out the enabling rule for you also, and you
#
will get more and more things.
#
In this, there are two kinds of challenges.
#
One is this whole process has lots of, I don't want to say gray areas, but it has lots of
#
You don't even really know many things.
#
And sometimes the guys who can do this, I mean, these, especially certain products like
#
cylinders and all, they are usable across multiple industries.
#
They're not just, you know, they may be oxygen cylinders, but a typical oxygen cylinder is
#
usable not just in a hospital, it's usable in many other settings as well.
#
And the typical equipment like that has life of 60 years, 70 years, eight years, whatever,
#
several decades, certainly.
#
The typical business in India doesn't have that kind of life.
#
So they tend to go through multiple industries.
#
They tend to have paths between multiple hands.
#
So that's a certain system of saying, refurbish them, get them audited, get them tested, put
#
them back in service, only if you're confident that you can blah, blah, blah.
#
Getting all of this to move suddenly one day is not easy, simply because various guys are
#
used to saying, ah, in a month they can do 200 of this.
#
Suddenly the system is going to various people like that and say, can you do 2000 this month?
#
Nobody who's been doing a hundred cylinders a month can suddenly do 2000, not only because
#
of capital, because that's all it is, the raw material, the sourcing, the valves, the
#
If you can get all this stuff and do it, it's just going to take forever.
#
Then there will be some truck driver who will have his own constraints.
#
He says, this is the car, this will go, this much will go, this is the car, I can put only,
#
you may have ordered 200 cylinders, but I can only put 180.
#
And then you'll encounter situations which are truly moral problems.
#
Two people want the same thing.
#
Both are related to saving lives.
#
You have to do something.
#
You can take the view that as a practical matter, I can only do this with one person
#
and therefore I have to let the other person go in some way to say, look, you find some
#
other thing that can be helpful to you.
#
You're not exactly playing God at that level, but you are sort of making choices that are
#
Then you have even more morally complex problems.
#
You know that the situation is desperate in one place, but the intermediary who is representing
#
that desperation and saying, please give us this thing, you don't trust the guy.
#
You don't trust the guy.
#
You think if you give this to this guy, he will sell it in the black market.
#
But you know that behind him is this massively desperate group.
#
You can either say, I'll try to go around the guy and find the blah blah and I'll invest
#
Or you can say, I can't do this thing.
#
It has uncertainty written all over it.
#
Even if this group has higher requirement, it is better that we give this stuff to some
#
place where we feel confident that it will be used in a hospital facility without getting
#
into some blah blah and also that you want to be accountable to the people who are spending
#
They're not giving it to me.
#
They're actually giving it to the manufacturers, but still they're giving it to you because
#
I mean, they're giving it to the manufacturer because they trust you.
#
In a situation like that, you have accountability, whether it is legal accountability or not,
#
it's basically your word that is driving the system in some way.
#
So there's a moral accountability for that.
#
So what happens in a situation?
#
You're making a choice not to send something somewhere, even though you know for a fact
#
And sometimes people in your own sort of circle that is trying to sort of help all this, it
#
becomes a conversation in that circle.
#
And then sometimes what will happen, the manufacturer himself is aware of a much higher need because
#
so many people are reaching out to him as well.
#
So there's a moral dilemma at that point.
#
And also some things that he will say, boss, I've been working continuously for 28 hours.
#
I can't just go on making stuff just because the need is very high.
#
And sometimes the payments won't happen on time.
#
Everybody wants advance payment, but sometimes it's just the way it is.
#
So you have to sort of say, you have to do like a combination of the Bhagavad Gita and
#
I don't know what you'll call it.
#
I sort of reduced it to three sentences.
#
Morality is a luxury of peacetime.
#
Shut the fuck up and do it.
#
So, but that's all it is.
#
The first two are true.
#
You're trying to say to the guy, I don't know the answers to these questions anymore
#
I like you have been put in a difficult situation by the overall catastrophe that all of us
#
find ourselves in and by our own voluntary decisions to do something about it.
#
This is not a decision that you can execute without a certain degree of, what's the word?
#
What was the opposite of equanimity?
#
I don't know what that's, right?
#
But gumption is what I would say.
#
If you don't have a degree of gumption about doing this kind of thing, you can't do it.
#
And I think for a lot of people who are joining this stuff, if you do this for four weeks,
#
it's more work experience than what you can do, get in a company or a job working for
#
And that's actually true because autonomy comes with the responsibility.
#
The demand is way more than anywhere the group can meet.
#
So you're all over the place doing all sorts of things.
#
Ultimately, over a period of time, you're just settling down into a rhythm that says,
#
I know who can close what, who I know in a trustable way, not just trust as in a probity,
#
but trust as in he's done it before.
#
And then lots of challenges will come and you'll get reminded of various things that
#
sort of, sometimes you'll get to a depressing situation where you'll say, should we try
#
to do all these things?
#
I'm going to give you an example.
#
Sometimes I can't tell you the specifics.
#
There was a hospital in which some people died because of some equipment just not working
#
And this is like, I mean, it's not in Karnataka, but we were anyway trying to help.
#
But there was also a sense in the administration there that we don't want to be seen as accepting
#
It's a calculus inside the political leadership in that space.
#
I don't want to get into why, but that's what you're hearing.
#
You have gone to the trouble of transporting something at great combination of effort and
#
expense to the doorstep of that facility.
#
The administrator of that facility says to you off the record, we need it.
#
Now you have to say, put it back on the truck, move it.
#
I can't solve this problem.
#
I can't solve this problem.
#
Then there are all these, there's a lot of buffoonery also.
#
Just complete buffoonery.
#
Lots of people have collected these concentrators and kept them up, kept them in their own properties
#
Like they think that an oxygen concentrator in the clubhouse is going to really do something
#
They have no idea this is a post-COVID medical device to be used in a hospital facility.
#
Lots of guys have bought five liters.
#
And it's not just like ordinary guys who you think will not know enough to distinguish
#
Some of the major donors have bought the wrong thing and they've got thousands of it.
#
And then people go to the government or to somebody who's helping like me and say, somebody
#
who called me up once and said, I have bought two oxygen plants.
#
They're coming in the next two, three days.
#
What should I do with them?
#
I'm like, dude, you bought an oxygen plant, right?
#
You didn't buy a cylinder.
#
You didn't buy something that's like, it's not off the shelf.
#
You bought something that is actually equipment that needs installation in the premises of
#
a facility and integration through piping and other connectivity to the service provided
#
in the, and you didn't think of this thing before you got it, right?
#
And now you want to know where it should be put.
#
But there are people like that.
#
There is stuff like that in the country.
#
It's just, I think about 10, 15% of the money is just floating around in completely useless
#
And if you channelize, if that had been channelized properly, a lot of things could have been
#
And then there are guys who will say, you will have your paying agency, right?
#
I have several who can help because many NGOs can help pay many bills.
#
That person will say, you have to fill out some paper.
#
You have to become a registered vendor in our system.
#
You have to become, you know, everybody's got a system for registering in this country,
#
like there's mindless amount of data collection, right?
#
I want to know everything about you before I'll help you, but I'm not going to tell
#
you whether I'm going to help you.
#
And in the process, since you will also say, since you're asking so much information about
#
me, I'll also ask you similar amounts of information about you.
#
So the net result is that we've exchanged massive amounts of information with each other,
#
but the transaction itself might not happen.
#
There's a lot of that kind of stuff too, but the need is on the ground all the time right
#
And some people will go out of the way and say, it'll sort itself out, we'll send it.
#
You deal with this later.
#
I feel this challenge of deciding what to give where is going to become morally more
#
complex as the virus goes into the villages.
#
We have done something in the villages, which has many consequences.
#
The first consequence is, I'll tell you also what we have done, the first thing that happened
#
is that in many states, there was a wholesale transfer of the health staff who were working
#
at these primary levels, you know, PHCs and community health centers in particular to
#
the district and taluk hospitals and to the city hospitals, right?
#
So the thinking I think at that time was this virus is attacking the cities, we have to
#
stop the virus in the cities.
#
If you don't stop it in the cities, you will never be able to deal with this thing if it
#
But the thing is you didn't stop it in the cities, despite all of this.
#
And of course, it was never possible to stop it this way in the city anyway.
#
And so while you did all that you thought you were doing to stop it in the city, the
#
virus went to the countryside.
#
Now in the countryside, you have all these PHCs and CHCs, which have been the numerator
#
of their staff, and several of them have thousands of COVID positive cases in their jurisdiction.
#
So there are PHCs out there and say, oh, in my jurisdiction about 2,000 people are COVID
#
I mean, like 2,000 people being COVID positive in a jurisdiction is like we also have roads,
#
At the moment, it's become ubiquitous in some, right?
#
There are several places like that.
#
But there's only one person there.
#
And they don't have anything like the kind of equipment that they need even to do the
#
sorting and the kind of thing that was organized in Mumbai where ward level committees figured
#
out how to triage and separate various people.
#
In theory, a village community could do that.
#
But in practice, they don't know how to do it.
#
Nobody's actually there to train them even the first day to give one day of training
#
The capacity to intervene in the rural communities, the small communities, and the remote communities
#
is just completely not there.
#
As the virus has moved into those communities, the sheer terror of, I mean, the biologists
#
will tell you that this is not a lethally infectious virus.
#
I mean, as viruses go, this thing is manageable, but it's hit a very large number of people.
#
And those people are running into a completely missing infrastructure for support.
#
And they're doing it in volumes that the system itself is overwhelmed by.
#
This is all to one side of the story.
#
And then you're trying to do something really quick in the middle of all of this stuff.
#
And then there are these technical issues, not technical issues, or reality technical
#
I don't know what you would call them.
#
I'll give you an example.
#
A general hospital runs on the assumption that the majority of people in the hospital
#
don't need oxygen support.
#
Some about, yeah, I don't know, let's say 60, 70% of the people can just need a general
#
There's a bunch of people that need oxygen in a highly attentive unit, and maybe a small
#
percentage that need an ICU bed.
#
And even if you have an oxygen plant, typically it is set up under that assumption that there
#
is a distribution of requirement, therefore you get a plant of a certain capacity.
#
Now you're saying we need to buy PSAs and put it in every hospital, because the hospitals
#
are all overwhelmed with people who need ICU beds and high attention beds.
#
But the problem is, now you need a different kind of plant.
#
The plant that you need is not to cater to 15 or 20% of the beds being occupied by these
#
kinds of patients, but to, okay.
#
But then you have two kinds of problems.
#
One, the piping infrastructure inside the hospital is not set up for this kind of external
#
So there are pressure-related issues in some cases, but equally this becomes a problem
#
for the donor community.
#
The donor community also starts asking, okay, I'm going to buy this PSA plant, which can
#
cater to a very large number of whatever, but actually this is overkill for what is
#
needed in the post-COVID scenario.
#
So should we really be buying this, right?
#
Can we be doing something else that is more modular, can be shifted somewhere?
#
So essentially you spend time trying to start the answer to that question.
#
There may be a reasonable way to do that, but maybe you can do a sequence of a serial
#
of five small plants instead of one large plant.
#
There are things you can do, but this is one part of it.
#
What I'm trying to say is that the infrastructure's readiness to absorb what you are giving itself
#
is having certain complexities in it.
#
Then in the infrastructure side, there's a distinction you have to make between storage
#
infrastructure and the materials that get delivered into that storage.
#
So if you have an oxygen cylinder for it or an oxygen plant, an LMO, liquid metal oxygen
#
plant, somebody has to take oxygen to it.
#
The oxygen supply cannot suddenly increase.
#
Yes, the government is doing something by saying talk to the steel manufacturers, talk
#
to the cement manufacturers and increase the oxygen supply.
#
But what this means is until you find a more stable and alternate source of oxygen supply,
#
the steel and cement industries are shut down.
#
In some way, you are caught in the choices that you have made to address one problem
#
because those very choices have made it impossible to solve another problem as well.
#
And there is an undersupply.
#
If you need 10 of something, even with these kinds of intervention, you'll only have six.
#
In some sense, the government has been put in a very difficult position of saying some
#
people are going to get oxygen, other people are not going to get oxygen.
#
And even if you say, well, all hospitals are getting oxygen in some level, that is only
#
because the demand at the hospital is 300, they're admitting only 25.
#
Those 25 are getting oxygen.
#
You are reeling about the death of 10 or 15 people in a hospital, 25 people in a hospital.
#
Those are the 25 people that managed to get into the hospital.
#
The demand at that very hospital was 300.
#
There isn't a new story about what happened to the 275 who didn't get into the hospital
#
because they died one by one at home, many of them, and that number is probably more
#
than the 25 that died in the hospital.
#
So you have a situation in which your record collection about the casualties is vastly
#
dependent on the infrastructure.
#
The infrastructure is rejecting the majority of the people that come to it.
#
So your data is all wrong.
#
So when people are using Shamika's curve, those diagrams and all of those kinds of things,
#
those bars and charts that keep coming.
#
I think as data analysis, okay, it's a technique.
#
If you want to learn some techniques like that, it's not a bad thing to follow that
#
and learn some techniques.
#
But as comprehension of reality, I'm actually looking to see, is there a nice visualization
#
strategy about data in this thing?
#
I'm not even looking at what the data is.
#
I don't believe that data at all.
#
And lots of people will tell you, no, no, no, no, how can you say that?
#
And I'm saying, of course, everything is official.
#
Have you seen the officials, right?
#
They themselves will tell you, sir, this is what we can put on paper because this is what
#
This is not the reality, right?
#
So this is all, I mean, I'll pause here because I don't know if you want to have any questions
#
This is a complex environment in which you're first trying to intervene.
#
You as a lay person from the outside, I mean, fortunately, in a group like the one that
#
we're constructing, there are hospital administrators who have done this job before in their own
#
So they have some knowledge, like Ashwin Nayak from Vatsalya, for example.
#
He's done this job before, right?
#
People like that who've done some job.
#
Someone you know has run a hospital.
#
So you're counting on their expertise to say, here, this can be done, that can be done,
#
But the vast majority of people doing this stuff have never been anywhere near a hospital.
#
I mean, at some level, the generalist leadership of the administrative services has also never
#
generally been before in front of a hospital.
#
So it's, in that sense, not very different.
#
But it also complicates the problem even more.
#
No one really knows what the right thing to be done is.
#
You're just learning that on the fly, approximating it, and meeting a small portion of even that
#
need while you're doing it.
#
That's the current situation.
#
Meanwhile, the thing is flaring out of hand.
#
And the science, I mean, I don't trust what they say at the science level at all.
#
Because if you see, the genome guys around the country are telling you about 20,000 sequences
#
have been done in India since the pandemic started.
#
And in most states, they've not done more than a few hundred.
#
How the hell can you tell what this virus looks like today if you're not actually doing
#
the genome sequencing day in and day out to understand what it's mutating into?
#
But there are also some guys who are saying, this has been a remarkably stable virus.
#
It hasn't mutated very much in the conventional sense or extent of how much mutations happen.
#
This virus hasn't done too much.
#
So there's a hope, a reasonable expectation, more than hope, that the vaccines that are
#
already out there should continue to work for even the mutations that have already happened
#
or the ones that we realistically think could happen.
#
That's a bit of a hope in the sense, you really don't know that to be true, but maybe there's
#
a statistical certainty of some of that.
#
But I'd still like to see the sequencing done all the time.
#
The vaccine rollout is another problem.
#
The vaccine rollout is just basic mathematics.
#
1.4 billion people leave out the children, that gives you, what, 900 million people that
#
you need to vaccinate, two doses, 1.8 billion doses.
#
The capacity inside the country is not more than 70 million doses per month.
#
Government isn't really giving enough money to boost that capacity to these guys.
#
They might get to 100 million doses a month by August, and 100 million doses a month,
#
you're going to get to complete vaccination only in the middle or late part of 2022.
#
Of course, you could introduce more vaccines into that thing, but that itself is a process.
#
And the process of saying this is approved, not approved, I can buy, you can buy, states
#
And also the reporting of this has been really bad.
#
There have been many, many, many reports saying we are running the world's largest vaccination
#
Of course, we'll run the world's largest anything.
#
You've got the world's largest number of people, anything that has to do with people count,
#
we will be running the world's largest number of that.
#
And then by some indications, actually, the Chinese population is already either close
#
to or lower than our population.
#
So we might actually have a situation where the population is bigger than the Chinese
#
To say that you have the world's largest program for this or that makes no sense.
#
What percentage of the people that need to receive this have received it?
#
If you have the world's largest program for something, how is it that so many other countries
#
are finishing their vaccinations before you are?
#
Because you have a lot more people.
#
But the second level of reporting is not happening in the media at all.
#
The media is quite happy to report the headline, but the headline is often coming from a press
#
And in fact, I've seen one other thing, which is that the first three paragraphs of any
#
news article are simply restatements of each other.
#
Amit Verma said today that 70,000 vaccines will be available by the middle of September.
#
In only a short period of four months, this means that India will have increased its capacity
#
There's no real content there except what's in the first sentence, but you can write that
#
for three and a half paragraphs.
#
There's a lot of that because they're just doing their 300 words or 400 words in the
#
So I think I should stop.
#
I'm telling you a very large number of complexities to deal with, but I can do this for three
#
I wish I could make you do this for three more hours.
#
So lots to process here, but let me sort of come to sort of restate a theoretical condition
#
that you spoke about and ask you to sort of get more concrete about it to aid our understanding,
#
which is, of course, the problem of triaging, where you said that, look, we're making moral
#
We are surrounded by incredible scarcity, not a little scarcity, but an incredible scarcity.
#
If there are 25 beds in a hospital, you have 300 people who are fighting for those.
#
And obviously the data will only capture to which of those 25 died when they did not get
#
oxygen, not about the 275 left out.
#
Now, the thing with this triaging is I completely get it that let's say that you get a donor.
#
It gives you money to get cylinders made and to have oxygen put in them.
#
But you have X number of cylinders, you know, A wants them, B wants them, C wants them.
#
Maybe you can save more lives in C, but probabilistic estimates come in because your interface with
#
You don't know how much likely it is to get there.
#
So you have to take all of that into account.
#
Plus what you don't always realize is that, you know, what is useful information in the
#
There's so much information flowing around.
#
Like in the early part of the second wave, there were all these calls being amplified
#
on social media for say plasma, which we know does not work for remdesivir, which most of
#
the time does not work.
#
It's a very limited use case and in no use case does it even delay fatalities or seriousness,
#
And you know, it's possible that there is misdirection of effort and resources over
#
So my question is about, you know, I mean, obviously you need to think probabilistically
#
and think about where you can get, I won't say bang for the buck, but the most positive
#
impact in terms of being able to save lives for whatever effort you can put in.
#
But before you do that, you need information.
#
There is this fog of information.
#
So two questions really.
#
One is how does that evolve?
#
Like do you develop what economists will call fast and frugal heuristics for guiding decision
#
It's on the basis of these things that I make these decisions.
#
How much does that fog of war in terms of information affect you?
#
And secondly, I'd really like you to get concrete without taking names of people or institutions
#
But just to give us a better sense of actual choices that you have faced in the field and
#
how you've resolved them and, you know, the dilemmas contained within.
#
Can you bring that alive for us?
#
So let's take the first one, the question about information.
#
So we have a system of saying there are needs and there are verified needs.
#
Every need has the potential to be a verified need.
#
And just because you have not verified them doesn't mean it's not a legitimate need.
#
But one of the moral choices you have to make is that you're only going to respond to verified
#
So those are very real, right?
#
You have asked for something, someone else has asked for something else.
#
I know for a fact that your ask is legitimate.
#
I have only one of those things anyway.
#
So I will say, look, I don't even need to ask the other guy if his need is legitimate.
#
I know Amit's need is legitimate, I have verified it.
#
So give the thing to Amit.
#
So that happens all the time because you are dealing only with verified needs.
#
The second thing is you know somebody on the ground who is telling you the situation on
#
the ground is different from what the administration is telling you.
#
It's not because the administration is misleading you.
#
Sometimes there's a risk of that, but by and large that's not the issue.
#
The administration is telling you something.
#
Typically what will happen in a state government is if you say what do you need, if you go
#
to Andhra Pradesh state government and say what do you need, they will give you a list
#
of requirements from every district commissioner.
#
If you need 10 cylinders or 15 concentrators or 10 ventilators, when you fill out the document
#
asking for those things, you will add a zero to every one of them, I guarantee it.
#
Nobody will ask for exactly what they need.
#
They'll always ask for a lot more than what they need.
#
And then of course now the donor community is chasing very large numbers of these kinds
#
of things being asked for because those are the official requests.
#
The official requests are for things that are in some cases far in excess of what is
#
But in some cases that many will not be needed because everybody is chasing that same list.
#
I have seen that there's one list that's floating around, which is this global sourcing of PSA
#
The guys who wrote that list, I got that list directly from them.
#
But the number of people who have incidentally brought that list to my attention saying I
#
got it from so-and-so, I got it from so-and-so, and who genuinely believe they've found another
#
set of sources from which you can buy.
#
So you're spending a lot of time just comparing some small things and saying this is the same
#
thing, this is the same thing.
#
And then the strategy, here's the thing, you're trying to buy something from a certain plant
#
I'm giving you an example.
#
I know for a fact that somebody is trying to buy the plant itself.
#
I can tell you that, but I have no certainty that the person is actually going to complete
#
buying that plant either.
#
But if I tell you that, you're going to say, oh, maybe I shouldn't follow this lead because
#
somebody else is going to buy out the whole plant, when am I going to get anything done
#
So what I'm trying to say is there are these kinds of dilemmas, which are not quite gray
#
areas, but which are simply choices at various points.
#
But there are also gray areas.
#
The reality is that nothing is without a gray area.
#
And in those, you really have to ask yourself, are you willing to go through the gray area
#
because it is necessary?
#
Or is there a way of beating down the extent of the gray so that frankly, it's, you know,
#
instead of 60% gray, it's only 10% gray?
#
At some level, I can't really talk about that.
#
And you can understand why it's not because it's a lot of other people making choices
#
But in some ways, it is necessary.
#
It's necessary that when you are buying a scarce product or a service, it is again and
#
again necessary to say only some people will get it.
#
And the process of making that thing itself has 10 steps.
#
But I'll put it to you like this, if one of those steps will take seven days and the rest
#
of the steps can be done in seven hours.
#
And if somebody says to you, sir, that seventh step, that one step that takes seven days,
#
And you also know for a fact that the center at which that seventh step is doing something
#
can only do a very, very small subset of what is brought to it.
#
So you have a situation on the ground where very large numbers of people are doing what
#
it takes to save lives.
#
There is no standard operating procedure to save lives.
#
Since there is no standard operating procedure to save lives, you have to do what you think
#
is helpful to save lives.
#
Is it possible for people to turn around and say you did not follow the standard operating
#
Would you save more lives if you did not follow the standard operating procedure?
#
I have no idea of knowing that.
#
I'm not the expert in these things.
#
I mean, the number of times in which within the group we have said to each other we shouldn't
#
be doing this, we are not the people to do this, is very high.
#
And that's really an odd thing because you are procuring an oxymeter or an oxygen concentrator.
#
Frankly, I couldn't have recognized that thing for several days after we got started on this
#
I was only hoping that the guys doing the actual procurement had seen that thing in
#
But what I'm saying is you're carrying out a lot of stuff of which you have only limited
#
knowledge and you are completely aware that this could lead at the very least to loss
#
I'll give you another example of stuff, there are guys who have bought equipment thinking
#
that it serves a certain capacity, a certain purpose, and they have kept it for that purpose.
#
This equipment is not at all for that purpose.
#
In fact, if you leave it there, their building probably will blow up in a little while.
#
A liquid oxygen tank in your basement, right?
#
Okay, I'm not going to say who has it, but there are people who bought a liquid oxygen
#
I think they were not ill-meaning or stupid or anything like that.
#
Somebody somewhere is telling you this can provide value.
#
And even if that is true, actually look at it the other side, let's say that it is true
#
that there is a way to safely keep a liquid oxygen tank in your basement and give yourself
#
some capacity for oxygen if necessary.
#
Even if that were true, I'm willing to bet that the procedure for keeping a liquid oxygen
#
tank in your basement does not exist.
#
Frankly, there is no procedure for saying I'm going to keep this in my basement and
#
certainly the health department has not quote unquote sanctioned this.
#
But you know it's happening.
#
And you know people are handling certain equipment who have not been certified to handle that
#
But there's nobody else to handle that equipment.
#
Should you say, well, I'm not going to give you, should you give equipment to people who
#
have had no certification at all to handle that equipment?
#
That's a real choice, right?
#
Because you don't know the number of people, the number of people who are certified to
#
use that equipment is vastly smaller than the number of people needed to handle the
#
So should you be buying and giving equipment to people who have no certification to handle
#
If that, if the answer is yes, you can't find dependent.
#
I'm giving you a sense of the kind of choices that you're making, that you're having to
#
The other thing is some districts have greater capacity than other districts.
#
So this is an interesting question in the whole spectrum.
#
Should you do things where you have the capacity to do them well or you should do things where
#
the need is the greatest?
#
Because these are very different geographies actually.
#
And if you do it where you have the capacity to do them well, typically you end up entrenching
#
and worsening an already bad historical deficit of infrastructure in some parts of the country,
#
the state or some parts of the country.
#
So everybody knows, for example, that Northeast Karnataka has had some deficits of infrastructure.
#
So that makes it harder to do some things in that thing.
#
So you can say, well, what's the point?
#
There isn't enough capacity to roll this out over here.
#
But that's also the point, that the need is greatest over there.
#
So you have to make those choices.
#
And sometimes the administrators will tell you, sir, you are arranging the donation.
#
And you're thinking neither I nor the donor nor the manufacturer wants to decide this.
#
The public authority to do these things should actually decide.
#
But the public authority is telling you, you decide because the public authority has its
#
own challenges in coming to the right decision.
#
I mean, like I said, I don't want to keep getting into the nitty gritty of this too
#
much because there are these kinds of realities that can go on endlessly.
#
So in one case, for example, we bought some equipment without some regulator that needed
#
to run that damn equipment.
#
Unfortunately, the procurement process from the donor to buy that thing exhausted the
#
money that was available to buy the thing.
#
The guy on the truck, the guy who's doing the dispatch says, I will send it to you.
#
And you can say, well, I don't want to do that.
#
Like we'll raise a new invoice, we'll create the proper record, you create a way bill for
#
that thing, and then we'll deal with all of these kinds of things.
#
Another set of people are the guys who need that are saying, why you mad?
#
And then there's another set of people, like one guy called me and said, sir, you know,
#
people like you, you have the network to be able to sort of surround yourself with six
#
other people to make these decisions.
#
I'm an accountant in this processing entity.
#
Six months from now, eight months from now, when people start to ask questions about how
#
this happened and how that happened, it's very likely that a very large number of the
#
people who are here representing the need today are not going to be there at that time.
#
And you have to sometimes tell accountants to spend, I have told accountants to spend
#
money that they do not have.
#
I'm giving you that I know that in their organizations sort of reserves against the ledger that we
#
have created, there isn't enough money to actually execute the transaction.
#
But I have told them, you do it.
#
The guy will say, how can I do that?
#
There isn't enough inflow for you.
#
It's not just making a technical point.
#
So I tell them, okay, the inflow will be there, just do it.
#
You juggle money from somebody else's account in your own organization.
#
He says, I have no authority from my boss to do that.
#
I said, yeah, but there are two kinds of authority, right?
#
You first decide whether this is true, whether this can be pulled off, whether more money
#
can be raised to cover the thing for a little while.
#
And if the answer to that is yes, you have to first decide whether you feel comfortable
#
doing that, whether your boss feels comfortable will come to that, whether your boss is given
#
that authority will come to that.
#
But first, do you feel comfortable doing that based on what you know about the cash flow
#
It just goes on and on and on.
#
I want to sort of continue on the data line, but on a separate this thing where what is
#
the flow of discovery where you figure out what actual needs are and the nuances of those
#
needs so that you can fulfill them.
#
For example, at the very basic level, you might know that these people need oxygen and
#
therefore you're the obvious solution for a donor will be by oxygen plants.
#
But then the question is that you have oxygen plants.
#
How do you set them up?
#
What are the processes?
#
And the question and I read that this is a problem somewhere that there is actually excess
#
oxygen in some places, but the scarcity is of cylinders.
#
And why are cylinders not being manufactured?
#
Because the people who manufacture the cylinders are not being able to run the factories because
#
the government has said oxygen is only for medical use, it's not for manufacturing this
#
stuff and it goes round and round.
#
Now my my thing is that therefore there is a danger that in this process there is a lot
#
of wastage in terms of effort and resources.
#
Then is there a way of codifying this developing knowledge as it, you know, forms so that you
#
are able to direct resources more and more sharply and more and more usefully as time
#
And is there then on the part of some donors or some people who are in this just the desire
#
to do something because they want to do something and solving the problem actually requires
#
a kind of a deeper application in this sense?
#
So kind of give me a sense of the practical flow of discovery.
#
If you have any example to share where you go down one rabbit hole and all these nuances
#
crop up, that would be great in sort of understanding at a practical level what it involves.
#
So I have a sheet of requirements from every district, from the government officially.
#
So this is what is needed.
#
In some cases it has come from the secretariat inside the government, in some cases it comes
#
from directly from the district.
#
Using Karnataka or India?
#
We have this from some other districts as well outside Karnataka as well, but inside
#
Karnataka we have this for every district.
#
And also there is a system of continuous contact with the leadership of the response effort
#
in Karnataka, the senior secretaries who are in charge of various things.
#
You have to keep in touch with them all the time and let them guide you a little bit about
#
what they are hearing in their system.
#
But that cannot be the only source of information because that hearing channel itself has its
#
So what you do is you also create other channels of information from your external sources
#
and you also feed that back into the government to say now you are in effect a floating system
#
of information providers to the government.
#
And sometimes those sheets of paper that the government generates may even be benefited
#
by the information that you have given.
#
Because you actually know the thing that needs to be done.
#
Many people on the ground in the administrative space do not know what is actually needed
#
in each of the facilities.
#
You actually need somebody who has done hospital administration to crack that.
#
But in many of the smaller places, no, there isn't anybody to make this assessment at all.
#
So there are three pieces of it.
#
One is the official record that comes out.
#
You try to influence the official record by giving it input about what you are seeing
#
on the ground so that it improves.
#
The second is there are certain things that anyway nothing is being delivered only by
#
the official machinery.
#
Whether you want oxygen cylinders or concentrators or ventilators or ICU beds or whatever, we
#
do not have a situation where all of this is being delivered only by the government.
#
Some of it is being delivered by the government, some of it is delivered by the private sector.
#
And some ad hoc arrangements are going on for all of that stuff.
#
So effectively you are running a parallel channel.
#
In fact, if you are smart, you should tell the government what you propose to do.
#
And if you tell the government what you propose to do, they can write that down and say, okay,
#
this piece will be done by so and so, that piece will be done by so and so.
#
And they can sort of factor all of that into it.
#
So it is absolutely essential, number one, to have continuous contact with the government
#
to do this kind of thing.
#
Second, you have to look for complementarity.
#
That is, some devices only work if one or two other things are also there in that place.
#
But the needs documents are not always written up in that way.
#
The needs document also in some cases, I haven't seen this much in Connecticut, but I've seen
#
The needs document will tell you what they want.
#
They don't tell you what they have.
#
And if they don't tell you what they have, you have no way of knowing whether the thing
#
that they want is going to work because it needs one more thing.
#
And that thing is not on this list.
#
So you don't know whether you should add that to that list or not.
#
So what you do, this is where that verifiable needs thing comes in.
#
You call the guy and say, I noticed that your list has A, B, and C, but A will not work
#
without D. Do you have D?
#
So you have to convert need into verifiable need.
#
And you have to do that whether you are the government or whether you are the outside
#
So what you try to do again and again and again is convert need into verifiable need
#
and keep complete transparency between what you know and what you are letting the government
#
know because that's the best chance of doing this.
#
There's another kind of problem.
#
Some donors will say, we want a request letter from the government.
#
I don't mind saying this, but you can say to the government, please sign this letter.
#
And the government also, I am sure, is getting dozens of such letters, not just from the
#
donors that are known to me, but many others that are known to me because everybody wants
#
I did this because the government asked me to do it.
#
It's not that I did it without any sanction for doing it.
#
But one, the process of getting that letter itself slows down the thing.
#
In some places, you have really good connects, you can do it fast.
#
But in a very large number of cases, you can't even do that quickly.
#
The second thing is in many cases, even if they gave you that letter, they don't actually
#
know that what they're saying in that letter is true, they're also going on faith.
#
So now you have to craft the language of that letter so that it includes some ambiguity.
#
The third thing is, it's kind of odd, and I've seen this in some cases, where you need
#
I come to you and say, here, take it.
#
But for a variety of reasons, on the official record, you cannot say, I need this.
#
Instead, you say, well, I'm doing whatever I can at full tilt to make all the things
#
possible that I can, but we recognize that this is inadequate.
#
We would therefore be willing to accept support from you.
#
This is what the letter will say in the end.
#
And the donor will come back and say, what is this?
#
And so you have to talk to the donor and say, what is your problem?
#
That's line number three, shut the fuck up and do it.
#
You have to say that six times a day, I'm telling you, and I've not even told you the
#
There are things I can't tell you.
#
You have to tell people again and again and again, just do it, yeah.
#
Don't ask so many questions.
#
And of course, I recognize the questions that you are asking add health, but you have the
#
luxury of discounting the fact that people are dying.
#
And the reason you have that luxury is that you are not standing on this side of that
#
If you're standing on this side of the problem, even you would sign it.
#
But if you're going to stand on that side of the problem, at least do the thing that
#
you can as fast as the guys want you to do it on this side of the problem, whether it's
#
coming from government or not, whether it's coming from the private sector or not, whether
#
it's the gray areas or not.
#
If you cannot act fast enough to enable the relief effort to go really quickly, you simply
#
cannot be adding value.
#
And a lot of people in institutional spaces, especially, simply don't get that.
#
Or they get it and they say, yeah, but six months from now, you won't be around and people
#
will be asking me questions in my organization.
#
But that's your moral choice.
#
Imagine, I'm having the moral choice of deciding who lives and who dies.
#
And you are saying that you don't want to deal with the choice of having to explain
#
to your boss why you spent money without the right authorization.
#
And so you have to educate the guy that, come on, if one side of people are taking risks
#
that are far greater than this, why can't you take three risks like this?
#
Some will, very few will.
#
So to whatever extent you can, tell me a little bit about the kind of relief work you guys
#
Like, one thing I noticed randomly on Twitter was where, you know, you were getting oxygen
#
cylinders supplied to someplace in Karnataka and Ruben in Bombay had managed to organize
#
And when the trucks were flagged off, he tweeted the photographs and you know that this is
#
going from this place to that place.
#
And I assume that that's just one minor detail among the things that you do.
#
So to whatever extent you can, without giving any details that you don't want to give, tell
#
me about the kind of things that you did and also tell me about how that fructified, like
#
I suppose at this moment, let's say you do X, Y, Z, but you know, when you get into relief,
#
it's a bouquet of options you can do anywhere from A to Z, but eventually you narrow down
#
to X, Y, Z, and you say that these are the places where we are most useful because obviously
#
there are resources of time, attention, money, all of those things.
#
So it'd be great if you can give me some insight.
#
There's also geography, you're sourcing the resource from a certain direction.
#
So you can get it to places that are closer to that direction.
#
So if you're sourcing it from Maharashtra, you can get it into North Karnataka faster.
#
If you're sourcing it from Tamil Nadu, you can get it into South Karnataka faster.
#
There's that also, which is limited.
#
So in the case of the stuff that happened with, you know, this, that Ruben did.
#
So we couldn't really find the guy, I mean, who said he could make these silhouettes.
#
And so what Ruben did is sort of, it's a useful kind of example, right?
#
So you're trying to buy something, some guy says he can sell it, right?
#
So you have no idea whether you can sell it or not, whether he's even legit or not.
#
So the first thing you have to do is like, okay, talk to the guy on the phone, try to
#
see what he tells you and all that.
#
Then you say, okay, I have some sense of it.
#
Then you say, okay, I'm going to go there and take a look because that's the only way
#
Then Ruben went to see one guy, right, like that.
#
The place he went to see him was somewhere in the middle of Dharavi, right?
#
And Ruben's thinking, even if the guy's here, I hope the facility where he's making the
#
damn things isn't here in some way, because this requires a proper setup to make all of
#
You're making, you know, concentrators, oxygen cylinders, things that don't really get put
#
together in, it's not like making shirts in your house for the textile industry.
#
So he goes there and then obviously he can't find the place.
#
There are so many bilanes and lanes inside the place that he's like totally, and Ruben
#
actually knows those places well, right?
#
He can't find the place, imagine.
#
And then he goes and says, okay, I'll get a cop.
#
There's also a little bit of a concern, you're just kind of going around looking for some
#
random guy, you're not from there.
#
So he took one cop and he went inside and he goes, somewhere he dug out the guy, right?
#
And that guy is, you know, he's just made all this turn left here, turn right there,
#
they finally found the guy.
#
Then it turns out that guy's facility is Navi Mumbai.
#
Then we say, okay, what we came to check was not you, we came to check whether you could
#
actually make the damn thing.
#
So now we are going to Navi Mumbai.
#
And the guy will say, you see the gray areas, right?
#
So in some way, you have to say, I want to see this thing.
#
This is the only way to get it done quickly and just do the damn thing quickly.
#
You also very well help.
#
And then you go there, he has a rice facility, he's got some seven things done and all of
#
So you sort of work with that process and get going.
#
But he's not done this in scale.
#
He's never needed to do this in scale.
#
And his sourcing for actually doing this is weak.
#
So you've got to find out who are all the guys who are part of his sourcing.
#
And you've got to figure out whether you can do something to enable that sourcing to work
#
Three of those guys will demand something.
#
So many guys will say, I want to under invoice you.
#
Lots of guys have said, I want to under invoice you.
#
Because there are lots of problems out there.
#
The government put a cap on some things, you know, the cap, the price cap on some things.
#
So some people get worried, they say, well, you know what, I want to under invoice you
#
because there's a price cap on this thing.
#
But in the market, that thing is there are only two choices.
#
The price caps have actually created a problem.
#
The price cap creates a situation in which the seller says I have to either under invoice
#
you and you pay the rest in cash or bugger off.
#
I don't even want to sell to you.
#
So you have to, your choices are not getting it or not or getting into a legal tangle.
#
You have to resolve that choice.
#
If you want the thing, right, there is no easy way to resolve that choice, right?
#
He will say, okay, sir, I do this, I do that, some nonsense, he will say and do something.
#
And then you have to say to the government, please remove this price cap or shift the
#
effective date for this price cap.
#
The states and the center have very different positions on some of these kinds of things.
#
It's all one big mess out there.
#
And because policy is a mess, action can never be, there are contradictory policies out there.
#
There is simply no way to follow all the policies.
#
Like they will say, only such and such a person can do this, right, in the manufacturer like
#
So only such and such a person can import something.
#
That person will have already imported it.
#
After he's imported it, they will say only such and such a person can transport it.
#
But the guy who has sort of imported it doesn't have that actual relationship.
#
He's just using his import export license to carry out an activity that he has never
#
previously carried out, right?
#
So somehow you have to figure out how to transfer the responsibility for the movement of the
#
thing inside the country to a guy who is not the guy who imported it into the country.
#
There's lots of paperwork.
#
It can be done, but there's lots of paperwork and it will take time, right?
#
But the thing is needed now.
#
If you are going to do it after seven days, what's the point?
#
The thing is needed now.
#
And sometimes you have various people, you know, the superintendent or police will say,
#
we need this now, right?
#
Somebody has to take that call as to whether to use it now or wait for the paperwork.
#
So what you do is you keep the administration informed.
#
This has to be done, right?
#
It is being done with your knowledge.
#
You even document that it is being done with their knowledge if necessary, but you do it.
#
So what I would say is there is no good way to tackle the pandemic because many things
#
that are needed to tackle the pandemic are not possible to do under the current legal
#
And until there is a more liberal framework that says, and you know what will happen under
#
emergency provisions, this framework doesn't actually become more liberal.
#
It becomes more, you know what I mean, centralized.
#
More restrictions, more rules.
#
Actually, yeah, the emergency should mean you can do more things that were not previously
#
But in an emergency, you'll actually say, we are not going to allow seven other things.
#
We are going to allow only three things that we think are necessary to solve the problem.
#
But if those three things do not form a complete set of what is needed to solve the problem
#
and the fourth thing is needed because of the emergency power, you can't solve the problem
#
until you sort of do the fourth thing anyway, whether there is a legal provision for it
#
So a lot of people are dealing with that dilemma.
#
There are not enough provisions in law that understand the situation on the ground and
#
No, in fact, this is worth pointing out because this, to a large extent, is dead by bureaucracy
#
because every delay literally costs you lives.
#
And the point is that you see the consequences now starkly where you can say that, okay,
#
this law conflicts with this law or this particular law doesn't allow this action to be taken
#
and therefore lives will be lost.
#
But the point is, but this whole framework of, you know, the center controlling everything
#
and all this red tapism and rent seeking has been with us for over 70 years and has hobbled
#
In fact, I would argue is probably cost many multiples of lives and COVID can in all kinds
#
of unseen ways in a slow drip, drip, drip kind of way where you are just not letting
#
society solve its own problems.
#
I keep saying that COVID-19 has made the dysfunctional state stark earlier we were in denial of it.
#
It's shown us how dysfunctional it is in a similar sense, it's shown us how evil this
#
kind of bureaucracy is.
#
You know that of course it is resulting in lives lost now, but the costs have been immense
#
anyway over the last seven and a half decades and no one's done anything about it.
#
That rant aside, what would you say are, you know, during this period in sort of the things
#
that you've done and the areas that you worked in, what are kind of your big learnings?
#
Like if you were to speak to the Ashwin Mahesh of say, before the second wave began, maybe
#
the Ashwin Mahesh of February, what quick learnings would you give him so that he doesn't
#
have to learn them the hard way?
#
I think we should have put together the capacity to keep ourselves informed earlier and we
#
should have put together that capacity to keep informed not only in the government but
#
outside the government, which is really the thing that is finally starting to happen.
#
I think as long as the government is the only one that knows something, it's not really
#
For something to be known in a meaningful way, it has to be known across state market
#
If it is known only to one of them, it's not a useful way of knowing anything to tackle
#
But if you look at government policy, government policy is based on the idea that it's better
#
for the people to be terrified in ignorance than for them to be terrified in an informed
#
So there's this thing called the Communicable Diseases Act.
#
I don't know if you know that.
#
The Communicable Diseases Act sort of has certain provisions which, you know, if you
#
properly implement them, if you go to a hospital and say, check me out for Dengue, check me
#
out for Chicken Gunya and all of that stuff.
#
They'll say, yeah, okay, we'll figure it out and go home.
#
And the hospital that actually knows that you have Dengue or Chicken Gunya is not in
#
a position to tell you that.
#
I'm giving you an example.
#
This particular provision, I'm giving you an example from two, three years ago, certainly.
#
So there is one National Institute of Virology.
#
Only this National Institute of Virology can tell whether something is reliably true.
#
And conceptually, there's nothing wrong with that.
#
You want these things to be done by somebody who has the actual capability to do that.
#
But all of these things were set up at a time when state capacity was much higher than private
#
1950s, 1960s, whatever.
#
But today's state capacity is nowhere near private capacity.
#
So what ends up happening, the guy in the hospital will tell you, you have Chicken Gunya,
#
And therefore, you should be doing A, B, C, D, E. But I didn't tell you that.
#
So there's a lot of stuff that is told orally, which is very different from what is told
#
Now, there are two kinds of problems.
#
One is that you start to do stuff before you've got that official thing, which you really
#
So all the doctors and the pharmacists who cooperate with you in doing that stuff are
#
actually breaking the law.
#
But if you want to be cured, that's the only way to do it.
#
Now, there's another kind of problem that the Institute of Virology might come back
#
and say, you don't have Chicken Gunya.
#
And meanwhile, for three days, you've been taking Chicken Gunya medicine, whatever that
#
So you've got another kind of moral paradox.
#
If you tell the guy, he has a chance of getting better.
#
But even as you tell the guy, you have no way of knowing that the thing that you're
#
telling the guy is what the official paperwork is going to say, even later.
#
So what's the solution?
#
It is a set of rules for which there is no solution because they contradict each other.
#
This is causing severe dissonance.
#
I can't wrap my head around this.
#
So tell me, part of it, of course, is that you coordinate with donors, you coordinate
#
with volunteers, you get all of it together.
#
But a significant part of it is coordinating with the state.
#
Sometimes it's understanding what their needs are.
#
And sometimes it is kind of getting these workarounds.
#
So now, one, this interface with government, how does it work in the short term?
#
Does it become more responsive and so on?
#
And two, is there a chance through this of solving any of the longer term structural
#
problems because that broader disaster is still with us?
#
Look, I think one good thing that has happened in many state governments is that because
#
of the scale of the problem, they have moved fairly competent people into the particular
#
parts of government that deal with this problem.
#
You understand, you can't take the guy who was underperforming for the last 20 years
#
in his career anyway and give him any job in this chain of command because then that's
#
That's pretty much he's the pandemic at that point, right?
#
So most governments have figured out if I do that, then these things are going to blow
#
So I might as well start to put people in the chain of command who I know at least will
#
do the job with a fair amount of integrity and a fair amount of industriousness about
#
just moving on the thing.
#
So that's one of the good things that the health departments throughout the country
#
have reasonably responded to the whole thing by migrating their officials, the stronger
#
officials to the health related focus.
#
But I don't know if you can count on that to be permanent because it's quite likely
#
that they form only a one third subset of the total thing.
#
Many of these people are in transferable jobs anyway.
#
So at some point that could dissipate again.
#
Somebody told me a couple of days ago, the government does not successively appoint
#
good officers to the same position, right?
#
So it's basically at the very least if someone is good now, you can sort of reasonably be
#
sure the next person is not going to be as good.
#
I mean, all that is statistical at some level.
#
But what I'm trying to say is the government interface works like this.
#
They have to believe that you are there only to help and that there is no other reason
#
that you are there and that you have to help them in a way that works with their system.
#
Even if their system is not the way you would like to help or even if you believe that this
#
is not the way to help, you have to at least help them make it work inside their system
#
in a way that this is the way that it is being organized.
#
Because if you don't do that, for example, let's say you want to represent something
#
to the government of Kerala, just to pick one random state, and say, I would like this.
#
Even if a private person who is playing a supporting role with the government of Kerala
#
were to go to the government and say, okay, this is a good thing, you should do it, you
#
Let Amit do this kind of thing, that government will come back and say, okay, based on the
#
authority or the influence that guy has, the government will say yes, not because anything
#
that you say is convincing enough to, they have no capacity to figure that out in the
#
So somebody is saying sign here.
#
So the government of any state has to sign because somebody is saying sign here, not
#
because anything that is said on that piece of paper is true.
#
But more importantly, they also need to be able to represent that with sufficient ambiguity.
#
So they recraft the language of what you're asking in a way that makes it look like, Amit,
#
you're being allowed to hit me, right?
#
There are health secretaries around the country who have told me, okay, okay, you can go ahead.
#
And it's at the tip of my tongue to say, what do you mean you can go ahead?
#
I'm trying to help you, right?
#
And all your body language says you are giving me permission.
#
If it was not for the fact that behind you there are millions of people who actually
#
need this help, I would have told you to just get lost and say there are enough people that
#
want my help and will take it with grace.
#
And the people that are volunteering their time to make all of this happen for you, they
#
don't deserve to hear this body language or actual words from you.
#
But you have to think about the people standing behind that guy and every instinct in your
#
body says he's not going to protect them.
#
But then what do you do?
#
So the government has also done certain things.
#
The government's in many, not just in Canada, many governments have done some, they have
#
various kinds of companies inside the government.
#
Every department has a company, right?
#
In some departments, this is basically managing director plus peon, because the company is
#
And what it means is that, so there are lots of procurement in government that needs to
#
be tendered as per the rules.
#
But if you tender to a government company, you don't need to follow that rule.
#
You can just like award it to them.
#
And they in turn can structurally award it to a subcontractor without a tender.
#
So I've seen, not just now, in the past, I mean, some four years ago, I had a situation
#
where somebody was saying this contract should be given to, I'm going to say, Karnataka Road
#
Development Corporation or some such organization.
#
So I said, okay, I was on some committee at that time.
#
And I said, in my judgment, this organization cannot do what they're saying it's proposing
#
I would like to see their presentation on what it is that they can do.
#
So they scheduled a presentation, and some guy from one of the multinational companies
#
came to make that presentation.
#
So I asked him, what company are you from?
#
I mean, you don't sound like the kind of guy that would work for KRD Health in any case.
#
And he said, no, I'm from whatever, a big private company, a big Korean company.
#
So I said, what are you doing here?
#
He said, no, no, we are the subcontractors who will be executing it.
#
I said, do you realize the contract itself has not been awarded?
#
This notion of a government company as an internal capacity building organization is a dodge.
#
It doesn't have anything like the kind of capacity for that service that exists in the
#
But is it kind of then a necessary jugat to get past their own red tape?
#
No, it is not a necessary jugat to get past their own red tape.
#
If they want, they can cut the red tape.
#
Yeah, they can cut the red tape.
#
But they won't do that because that diminishes their power.
#
So it is then not a necessary jugat, not a necessary jugat, because it is a jugat, but
#
it is not a necessary jugat.
#
That's what I'm trying.
#
So every time you ask this bad things, I always say, so there's one more thing in government
#
Among the senior bureaucracy, there's a lot of people who are married to other senior
#
That's actually a useful thing.
#
You know what I mean, because if you have an ally, you have actually two allies in getting
#
And often, they're posted in slightly different things.
#
So actually, you can get into some complementarity as well.
#
And the government does one thing.
#
I think the government does make an effort to post you together in the same job.
#
I mean, you can go and ask.
#
Even if the government doesn't, you can sort of put in a request, and if you know where
#
to put the request in, it will be met.
#
And all of those kinds of things are true.
#
And therefore, in a field operation, like a relief operation, that's very useful.
#
Because now you've got two people who can chase this stuff, right?
#
And I've even, I had a situation some years ago, I'm not going to say who, in which somebody
#
told me, either I or my spouse will become chief secretary three years from now, four
#
Because you can figure out, if you look at the civil list, you can figure out who's going
#
In fact, that system is so harmful, I'll tell you.
#
In institutions like ISRO, I've seen this in ISRO, where people will look at the likelihood
#
of them getting into the top one or two jobs based on an internal system of calibrating
#
And they will actually say, I should take the last five years of my life and just go.
#
I go and join Orbital Sciences Corporation, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, whatever it is
#
I have the necessary expertise, I'm not going to make it to the top, I might as well find
#
I feel this system should be relooked at.
#
I know nowadays some state governments feel it's all right to pick whoever for the top
#
job, especially the chief secretary's job or the DGP's job based on one or two eligible
#
I know there are even procedures for that nowadays.
#
I think it's actually a fairly deeply rooted system, and the media actually doesn't even
#
The media will say, for example, Amit Verma has been promoted to the rank of additional
#
It's got nothing to do with what Amit Verma did or did not do.
#
On that timetable, you'll become additional DGP.
#
In fact, it's kind of perverse, just by where you finish in the IES rank and your year of
#
birth, you can basically predict how far you'll get in the system.
#
So you have to do like a Malcolm Gladwell kind of thing on that and figure out if there's
#
a January bias or something like that.
#
But there might be such stuff.
#
I would say something else, that the civil list does get distorted from time to time
#
because some people leave to go to the center.
#
If you leave to go to the center, that's another set of distortion of that stuff.
#
But I think it's important to keep in touch with the senior bureaucracy in particular,
#
because genuinely, they can move mountains inside the system.
#
Finish your anecdote, by the way, about what this person told you, that in three years,
#
me or my spouse will be chief executive.
#
So the advantage of that is the way the people cooperate with each other is actually based
#
on some calculus like that, right?
#
I'm not talking about the political class alone, I'm saying the rest of the bureaucracy
#
And there's also the system, right?
#
Bureaucrats behave a certain way in their 30s, a different way in their 40s, and a different
#
And the 30s are fairly uniform.
#
The 40s are fairly uniform.
#
The first half of the 50s are also fairly uniform.
#
The second half of the 50s really depends on your batch here, whether you're going to
#
retire as principal secretary, whether you're going to retire as additional chief secretary,
#
whether you're going to retire as chief secretary, and whether you're looking for post-retirement
#
continuity in government positions or not.
#
There is a lot of variability in that last five years.
#
And in some way, I think it's a useful thing to keep an eye on.
#
Because a very large number of people with good networks are retiring every year.
#
And among that group, there is a subset whose service to the country even after their retirement
#
But by and large, the government will not appoint them to any post-retirement service
#
I'm being quite blunt about this thing, that you cannot become an election commissioner
#
in this country, for example, if you're actually going to do anything to reform that commission.
#
The very premise is that you're going to do exactly what was done in 1971 with half the
#
So in a way, people get jaded about all of this stuff and start to say, go away.
#
But I'll tell you one other thing.
#
Many couples are like that, A or B being chief secretary kind of thing.
#
I mean, Connecticut certainly has had at least seven, eight officers that I can just recall
#
off the top of my head who meet that definition.
#
Sometimes one of them will be in the police and the other one will be in the administrative
#
But be that as it may, there was one protest rally that I went to, I'm going to say seven
#
And I met somebody who had been married to a chief secretary.
#
I mean, he was still married to the chief secretary, but when his spouse, his wife was
#
in service, she was chief secretary, and I met them, I met him at this sort of protest
#
rally, but something, some local civic issue.
#
And I asked him, what on earth are you doing here?
#
You know what, you were like a central government secretary, your wife used to be chief secretary.
#
You don't, shouldn't have to protest here on the street to do something like this.
#
The street protest is for guys like me and others who really have to move the system
#
without any authority at all.
#
And he said, that's the cliff that you are facing in government, that when you're out
#
of it, you're out of it.
#
You're out of it, you're out of it.
#
There is something that can be done to reform that.
#
In my judgment, we need to have more officers come into the IAS from the states.
#
The unfortunate part is the way state officers get promoted into the IAS is set up in such
#
a way that it is fairly late in their professional lives that they get inducted into the IAS.
#
And they do not get what I would consider an age appropriate batch at that point.
#
You will get inducted into the IAS when you are 50, but in batch terms, in grade you will
#
be, or rank you will be roughly where the 42 year olds are.
#
So you're never going to end up as one of the really top guys.
#
I've seen that happen once or twice, but that was for political reasons.
#
But you're not going to end up close enough, most in fact don't even become additional
#
They only become principals secretaries.
#
So I think, but the advantage of the guys inside the state system is that they have
#
spent long years in the same departments.
#
So they actually know something really well, that if you go to even a paracetal, you go
#
to BMTC or your best type thing in Mumbai, the guy who is number two in best knows best
#
The guy who's number one can never know it the way the guy who's number two does, but
#
the guy who's number two can never become number one in that system.
#
It's theoretically possible, but for all practical reasons it doesn't happen.
#
So we've set up a system of administration in which these things that are desirable are
#
actually forbidden in practice.
#
So this is what I meant by saying that you actually have a set of rules and laws and
#
policies which forbid good outcomes, except that they are written in the name of creating
#
It's so revelatory, all of this sort of discussion of the internal government structure.
#
What you said about what that gentleman said when he met you at the protest rally, that
#
you just fall off a cliff when you're no longer in government.
#
I think one of the key problems there is government just has too much power.
#
One question I'm not going to ask you because I feel it would be unfair to put you on the
#
spot is whether in situations like this, what is a proportion out of 100 to which government
#
is a help and what is a proportion to which it is a hindrance?
#
Because you work with government, so your incentives will be tailored towards sort of
#
No, no, I'm quite happy to answer that question.
#
I'm quite happy to answer that question.
#
Because there's a certain interesting nuance to it.
#
I'm going to say it's 15% that will help you.
#
50% would be hostile and about 30 odd percent will be all right.
#
They need the help, but they're not hostile either.
#
This is about the people.
#
What about the structures of government?
#
The structure actually has no meaning because there's a way of doing this.
#
Let's say only 10%, 15% of the people will be helpful and are even frankly in any worth
#
Let me go to the extent of sort of saying something like that.
#
But the thing is every officer that you engage with is comfortable with that engagement in
#
a way that assumes throughout that engagement that he or she is in that 15%.
#
So that's really what it is.
#
Therefore, it's not really a big thing to say only 10% of the people are good or 15%
#
of the people are good.
#
It doesn't really create any, it doesn't burn any bridges.
#
It doesn't ruffle anybody's feathers.
#
And also they themselves know it in a way.
#
But there's a way and there's another interesting thing about government.
#
Let's say I am a MC at an event and you're one of the panelists and I were to say to
#
the audience, this is Amit Verma.
#
He's held 23 jobs in the last 15 years.
#
And therefore, he has a wide range of experience, rich experience in many different fields.
#
But the audience is going to look at that and say, what crap, right?
#
But you can go to any event where a senior public official is introduced and I guarantee
#
you that the spread of their postings is referred to and sort of hailed as wide and important
#
And that I think is actually not because they, many of them are not even expecting it.
#
Many of them will say this is just something, they're dismissive of the whole thing, they
#
think this is just procedural.
#
But for some reason, maybe it's just the hangover from the way power was derived and is exercised
#
For some reason, we have too many people in the audience who are ready to clap before
#
the batsman has scored.
#
There are our spectators are hailing lots of play and miss, lots of dog balls, lots
#
of hit on the helmet, that no matter what happens to the batter, there's a very large
#
part of the spectator group that is cheering and I actually don't know why it is because
#
if you ask me, I don't think the officers expect them to cheer.
#
No, I mean, it's a religion of government firstly and that's a lovely sort of very
#
illuminative thing you said about only 15% help, but 100% will think they are part of
#
It's like Garrison Keeler's famous Lake Wobegon effect.
#
Garrison Keeler was a novelist who created this place called Lake Wobegon, where everybody
#
All the children are smart, all the women are good looking, I forget that phrase that
#
But the idea is the absurdity of everybody being above average, which you know, and in
#
fact surveys have shown that everyone who drives sings they are an above average driver,
#
which of course is not possible, right, because what is even the meaning of average.
#
So Ashwin, we have another 15 minutes of talking left and I'm extremely grateful and feeling
#
a little guilty that I took so much of your time because I think there are far more important
#
things you should be doing.
#
But my final question is really in a sense a two part question, which is a question of
#
And I mean this in two parts.
#
One part is with reference to this immediate COVID-19 crisis, where is all of this going?
#
You've had a very close look at administration.
#
In fact, one could say that you've, you know, I think by and large society solves its own
#
problems because in India, especially the state is abdicated and you've been a part
#
of that, but you've also been a part of getting the state to work and you've seen that process
#
So in the immediate sort of short to medium term, where do you see this going?
#
And my other question is, in the longer term, what will remain of this?
#
Like it is true that there are people who are apathetic, who will remain apathetic,
#
but many people have felt connected to others because of the shared experience of community
#
suffering and they've come out and they're helping and all of that.
#
Will that remain or will it be back to the old normal after this is over?
#
You know, how hopeful are you about that?
#
What do you see happening?
#
So on that last question, there is now a deliberate effort to build those networks emerging from
#
the relief effort and create a structure for persistence out of them that can you create
#
in some effect a national volunteer organization that is not always, it's about being standby
#
to do relief work, but is active across a spectrum of activity covering, you know, equity,
#
ecology, and maybe the economy.
#
And therefore, it has many, many tentacles from which you can sort of emerge.
#
And can you even link it to education, not only in the schools, but even other kinds
#
of education, post-schooling and post-college.
#
So definitely, there is thinking going on to say, we have to build this organization,
#
the national, you know, a kind of a national volunteer organization, which I also think
#
has a reasonable chance of representing or being another symbol of patriotism even, which
#
is to say that there is another way to wave the flag and in a way that is inclusive, in
#
a way that is progressive and all of that.
#
And I think that so definitely that is, as we speak, we're trying to construct that and
#
see how that can emerge from something like this over time, number one.
#
Second thing is, I really believe that officials at different levels, not everybody, but, you
#
know, especially because of the concentration of the competent that I referred to earlier,
#
there is a set of officials who will come into contact with very large numbers of people
#
in civil society on whom they can count on for in some way to be able to do more things
#
no matter where they go in their careers.
#
And that's a useful outcome as well.
#
As far as the pandemic itself goes, I think almost certainly everybody now believes that
#
wave three is coming, that it's going to hurt the children disproportionately and that a
#
set of things that need to be done.
#
I feel that the big cities will get to manageable levels of, when I say manageable, these are
#
all terrible words because manageable really in this context means acceptable losses, right?
#
It's almost the language of war, the big cities will get to acceptable losses in a few weeks.
#
The next set of cities could in some cases get there faster, but in some cases get there
#
at least a few weeks later, but not much later than that.
#
The thing that is giving everybody great cause for concern is the rural healthcare infrastructure,
#
really the third tier of healthcare infrastructure, which historically has been so weak as to
#
be nothing more than a referral point.
#
You say you've got a problem, so there's nothing really in your village.
#
So you go to the PHC, which is itself one out of three villages, right, has a PHC.
#
So then you go to the PHC.
#
The PHC is basically, I don't know, a pulse thermometer and a few other things.
#
And maybe it had four people and three of them had other jobs as well.
#
So now you're kind of at the most a referral center.
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And that also meant that if you had to go to some higher level of capability in the
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healthcare infrastructure, you really had to do that at your own cost and your own whatever.
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You have to go somewhere, take care of yourself in another place, blah, blah, blah, all of
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that stuff, in addition to needing the care.
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But now you've got a situation where if you go to that facility, there are a thousand
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people like you at that facility.
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So that facility can reach a degree of self-sufficiency for the people that it was originally intended
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But it is continuing to be overwhelmed from the people who are from other jurisdictions
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that should have been served by anybody else.
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What historically has been a three-layer system for care with different levels of health care
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capacity at each level.
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So the tertiary hospital needed to have capabilities that the secondary hospital did not in the
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primary health center did not, right?
#
Today you have a situation in which the tertiary capability is needed in the village in some
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cases, and merely referring the person from the village to the district hospital is inadequate.
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That hospital is already swamped with serving the tertiary capacity that it is supposed
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So I hate to say this, so far I've not heard from any of the chatter, any of the groups
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looking at this problem, what the solution to this is.
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Let us talk of one thing, which I find interesting, the idea of a small cluster of ICU beds, 10
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beds at a time, 15 beds at a time that would go into the PHCs itself.
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And then some people are optimistic about telemedicine and teleconsulting and all of
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I think it is possible for an NGO that is sufficiently organized to pull off 10 of this,
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15 of this, 20 of this, whether all of us together can pull off 4,000 of that, 6,000
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of that in large states, I have my doubts about that.
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I think we're in for a time of really difficult choices for a long time.
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And it's not simply a question of whether people live or die.
#
Even if they are incapacitated a little, I had a situation reported to me a few days
#
ago about somebody who, you know, his grandfather or somebody died of COVID, his uncle and aunt
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died of COVID, his mother had COVID, did not have COVID or she had COVID, she went into
#
the hospital, she recovered from the thing and then the ventilator failed or some bizarre
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And absolutely horrible, horrible stuff that if the sum of all these stories doesn't tell
#
even half of what is going on out there, and that is the scary part that I think it is
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only if you get involved that you'll actually know what is going on, that the media isn't
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a sufficiently useful source of information now.
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So I have an observation for my listeners, really, and a final question for you.
#
And the observation is this, that I think almost everyone who listens to the show is
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part of an English speaking elite.
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Some of us are outside India, most of us are inside India, but we are in our bubbles.
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And we miss the severity of the first wave because it didn't happen to PLU, it didn't
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happen to people like us.
#
Like a friend of mine told me about this seroprevalence study that he had gotten done in Mumbai in
#
December, I don't know if the results were public, which found that 55% of people in
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the slums already had COVID, but only 11% of the people in the high rises.
#
And one of the reasons that people like us are noticing the second wave so much is that
#
You know, earlier it was unseen because it didn't happen to us because we were safe in
#
lockdown in our high rises.
#
Now it has hit us, we see it.
#
And now what is going to happen moving forward is as it recedes from the cities, it'll devastate
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I mean, the magnitude of the damage it could do is my mind just boggles.
#
And it might again be unseen to us.
#
So my final question to you, Ashwin, is this, that if people listening to this say that
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I want to get involved, I want to help, but I want to do it in a practical way.
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I don't want to be a pest.
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I don't want to just sort of be a burden on the system.
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I actually want to help, what should I do with or without you?
#
Like can I, you know, then the question to them would be that how can I help you, Ashwin,
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or what else can a citizen do?
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So you know, two-pronged question.
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Honestly, one thing in response to what you observed, certainly it is true that people
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are responding because it is hitting them.
#
I had a conversation with the head of a very large non-profit organization, which is used
#
to receiving lots of donations from, you know, major donors.
#
And she said they are willing to donate more money because their executives are there.
#
That's really all it is, right?
#
So there is some of that, that it is hitting us and therefore it's stirring some, you know,
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That's actually not very sustainable.
#
It'll die off fairly quickly.
#
In response to, I mean die off is the wrong word to use, but in response to what you asked,
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I think there is a very simple thing.
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No matter where you live, there is a system of public health care for the area that you
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If you are not able to do anything more than this, become aware of what that public health
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care facility is able to do and become supportive of it in whatever little way you can.
#
Forget about, I'm not saying ignore the private thing, but no matter where you live, there
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is a public health facility that is supposed to serve you.
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Figure out how you can support it.
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If all you can do is figure out what it needs and surface that, do that.
#
If you're able to meet some of those needs, either yourself or in collaboration with others,
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But I think that if we do not resolve to engage with our public health institutions and infrastructure,
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no idea of development that we are thinking about is going to emerge.
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Keep in mind that in developed economies, developed societies, nearly a third of all
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public expenditure is on health.
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So really, government equal to health for a lot of developed societies.
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If you say that the majority of the truth is the truth, then health is government.
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That if you really care about better governance, there's a very simple way.
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Go to your local PHC and improve it.
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You'll get the better governance that you're looking for.
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Ashwin, more power to you and thanks so much for your time and your insights.
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I enjoy being on this program.
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I think it's adding a lot of value to people.
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I've said that before as well.
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And I'm thankful for what you're doing as well.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, do check out the show notes for a deeper dive.
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You can follow Ashwin on Twitter at Ashwin Mahesh One Word.
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You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
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Thank you for listening.
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Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
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If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
#
You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
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this podcast alive and kicking.
