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Extent of India’s COVID nudge campaign revealed

ta385 — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 07:21:22 +0000

India has reported nearly five million COVID-19 cases and well over 80,000 deaths (as of 17 September 2020), making the country one of the worst hit in the world. But an even greater tragedy may have unfolded had India’s government not used nudge theory to maintain one of the world’s strictest and longest lockdowns in the first quarter of the year. This is the view of a new study by Ramit Debnath and Dr Ronita Bardhan from Cambridge’s Behaviour and Building Performance Group, Department of Architecture.

Using machine learning and AI-based algorithms to analyse almost 400 government press releases, they show how India nudged across 14 key policy areas to influence the behaviour of 1.3 billion people, including government employees, scientists, health professionals, manufacturers, food suppliers and students to help fight COVID-19. ̽��ֱ��researchers argue that nudges from India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, were particularly important in creating herd effect on lockdown and social distancing norms across the nation.

̽��ֱ��study, published in PLoS ONE, found that the government deployed nudge techniques to tackle a wide range of urgent challenges between 15 January and 14 April 2020. Nudging is a design-based public policy approach which uses positive and negative reinforcements to modify the behaviour of a population.

In January and February, policy nudges were focused on evaluating the risk of incoming travellers from China and extending surveillance at international airports. But the narrative soon shifted to address other pressing concerns. By March, nudges sought to impose new restrictions on travel, discouraging people from visiting crowded and public spaces, and strict social distancing. On 24 March, Modi told the nation that “21 days is critical to breaking the infection cycle… or else the country and your family could be set back 21 years”. ̽��ֱ��next day, the country entered phase 1 of lockdown.

̽��ֱ��government nudged to tackle fake news about the virus and to convince the population to strictly adhere to the rules, use masks and wash hand frequently. At the same time, it conducted surveillance in urban areas using smart technologies that included drones, spatial analysis, low-power Bluetooth mobile phone applications and humanoid robots.

Ramit Debnath said: “Nudge-based policy approaches are crucial in a democratic country like India which has a vast population and geo-spatial divide, high levels of illiteracy and an extremely vulnerable health system.”

Ronita Bardhan added: “ ̽��ֱ��government urgently needed to buy time and it had to bring a diverse population together to fight a common struggle – this was a huge challenge. Our findings show that the government needed much more than scientific data to convince people, they appealed to powerful values including patriotism, family, religion and community.”

̽��ֱ��study highlights the role played by the ‘Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund’ (PM CARES Fund) which was created to nudge the public to make micro-donations and encourage public participation to help tackle the crisis. On 5 April, the Prime Minister nudged people to voluntarily switch off their lights for ten minutes in solidarity with frontline workers. Most of these nudges were made with social media advertisements, SMS forwards and broadcast media.

̽��ֱ��study found that government ministries nudged India’s manufacturing firms to produce PPE, hand sanitiser and masks to meet the national demand, while also seeking to protect the country’s food security and supply chains at a critical time – India’s farmers harvest their winter crops from February to April.

Meanwhile, the government spurred on India’s scientific community to fight the pandemic, releasing funding through the Department of Science and Technology. Research institutions were encouraged to submit proposals to focus on the development of affordable diagnostics, vaccines, antivirals, disease models, and other R&D to study COVID-19.

Scientific innovation during this period included robots for encouraging social distancing in public spaces and healthcare centres; and a contact tracing app (AarogyaSetu) using GPS and Bluetooth. Frequent SMS reminders were used to nudge people to use the app. ̽��ֱ��Ministry of Human Resource Development also nudged the start-up and innovation community in India to participate in the fight for COVID-19 by launching programs like ‘Fight Corona IDEAthon’.

To support education, the government encouraged home-schooling by aggressively advertising the use of the National Digital Library of India. ̽��ֱ��government even harnessed nostalgia to help keep people at home during lockdown by broadcasting popular ‘80s and ‘90s TV shows on the national channel, Doordarshan.

̽��ֱ��study demonstrates how nudge strategies evolved as the crisis unfolded. Between January and the first week of March, for instance, one government ministry (AYUSH) was aggressively nudging people to follow the traditional medicinal practice of Ayurveda and to maintain good health through yoga to increase immunity, while also insisting on disciplined personal hygiene. However, in mid-March, as infection rates increased, the nudges shifted away from traditional treatments to promoting a healthy lifestyle using hashtags like #YOGAathome.

̽��ֱ��researchers used topic modelling, a computational social science method that has its basis in text mining and natural language processing. It automatically analyses text data to determine cluster words for a set of documents.

̽��ֱ��Government started lifting lockdown restrictions on 7 June 2020, and the spread of the virus has since accelerated. But the benefits of the government’s nudge campaign are still being felt, the researchers believe. Ronita Bardhan says: “Behaviour changes encouraged by nudges earlier in the year, including the wearing of masks and social distancing, are still widely maintained across India. These nudges are still helping to save lives.”

̽��ֱ��study does not attempt to assess the success or failure of the Government of India’s policy interventions, rather to understand how context-specific latent nudges were created through policy interventions.

Ramit Debnath is a Gates Cambridge Scholar at Churchill College; Dr Ronita Bardhan is ̽��ֱ�� Lecturer of Sustainability in the Built Environment and a Fellow at Selwyn College.

Reference

R. Debnath R & R. Bardhan, ‘India nudges to contain COVID-19 pandemic: A reactive public policy analysis using machine-learning based topic modelling’, PLoS ONE (2020). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0238972.

̽��ֱ��Government of India’s use of nudge theory in the first three months of the pandemic helped to tackle the virus on numerous fronts, a new study suggests.

̽��ֱ��government urgently needed to buy time and ... bring a diverse population together to fight a common struggle

Ronita Bardhan

Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

India flag face mask.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Music and the battle for Granada's past

ta385 — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 17:32:15 +0000

Concerns over immigration and the rise of the far-right in Spain are fuelling tensions at one of its most important festivals, the Día de la Toma in Granada. And as a new Cambridge study reveals, music has become a key battleground.

Stability, unity and nonchalance: What does it mean to be English?

tdk25 — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 00:00:47 +0000

It may seem difficult to believe amid continual current debates over immigration, but an aversion to patriotic flag-waving and a relative tolerance of other cultures are both key components of English identity, according to a new history of England, published today.

̽��ֱ��conclusions are just two of those reached in ̽��ֱ��English and Their History, a sweeping survey of the last 13 centuries by the historian Professor Robert Tombs which, by examining the development of the nation and Englishness since Anglo-Saxon times, attempts to answer the enduring and complex question of what it means to be English.

Part of that answer, he suggests, is to be found in a healthy “nonchalance” about national identity that has made the English – while by no means saints – resistant to racism and broadly tolerant of other cultures.

This is, however, only one small piece of the extensive verdict that Tombs, who teaches and researches modern European History at St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, reaches in the conclusion of a study that has been six years in the making.

Elsewhere, he perhaps surprisingly argues that the widespread view that England is in a state of post-Imperial political and economic decline is a myth. ̽��ֱ��book also suggests that political isolationism from larger structures – whether the Empire or Europe – has rarely been a part of English history or nature, and identifies a fascinating history of political polarisation on sectarian lines that has, in the modern age, evolved into the split between “Ambridge and Coronation Street”.

̽��ֱ��book, published on Thursday, November 6 by Allen Lane, is the first single-volume history of England to be produced on this scale since the 1930s. Starting in the Anglo-Saxon era and ending in 2014, it aims in part to explore, through the English people’s developing understanding of themselves, what their history means at a time when ties within the United Kingdom appear to be loosening.

“It tries to reflect on how we have understood history, what the past means to us today, and what it might mean to us in the future,” Tombs said. “It is an attempt to say, ‘this is the sort of country we are, and this is what our history has made us’. It’s up to the reader to decide how to use that and whether or not they agree.”

While the multicultural character of English history has been well-documented, Tombs argues that a tolerance of other peoples and, historically, of immigration, has become a component of the country’s national identity.

Central to his argument is the fact that England has, for very little of its history, stood alone. Most of the time it has been the core nation in a multinational state, or at one stage in the Empire. Only between King Alfred and King Cnut, and then during the Tudor period (along with Wales), did England operate as an isolated political entity.

Because of this, the book suggests that English identity tends not to be expressed in terms of ethnic purity or cultural distinctiveness, and it has typically made little political sense for England to “beat the nationalist drum”. Instead, Tombs argues that England has historically propagated its values through interaction with others – spreading Christianity in Medieval times, as a force for European civilisation and free trade more recently, and as an Empire. ̽��ֱ��result, he says, is that Englishness is not founded on ideas of opposition and exclusion, but on inclusion and expansion.

One effect of this is a general “nonchalance” about national identity. “We don’t normally go in for a lot of flag-waving, we find that fairly un-English,” Tombs said. “That nonchalance has made us pretty resistant to racism. That is not to deny that racism has played a part in English history, but it has not been a defining character of our history. And thanks to our memory of resistance to Hitler in the Second World War there is no nostalgia for Fascism in England as we are now seeing in several other countries.”

While some agonise over the lack of a clear patriotic identity or devotion to the national flag, Tombs argues that “there is something to be said for national nonchalance”.

“In recent decades, the English have largely accommodated the shifts brought by changing moralities and multi-ethnicity, incorporating them into new varieties of Englishness,” he writes. “Who could be more English today than Rita Ora and Dizzee Rascal, Jessica Ennis and Rio Ferdinand?”

Another eye-catching argument within Tombs’ extensive survey is that “declinism” – the suggestion that England and Britain as a whole have lost economic and political standing on the world stage since the end of Empire – is a myth.

Key to this is one of the book’s central propositions – that the history of England shows the nation to have been relatively rich, secure and orderly for most of its history. Notwithstanding periods of upheaval, such as the Wars of the Roses, Peasants’ Revolt or even the Civil War (a small-scale affair compared with the prolonged and bloody experiences going on in France and Germany at the same time, Tombs says), Britain has been relatively immune to transformative catastrophes such as invasion, war and revolution.

̽��ֱ��result is the survival of ancient buildings, cultural treasures, and national institutions such as the Crown, Parliament, shires, boroughs, the Church, universities, schools, charitable foundations, voluntary associations and more. This is reinforced by long-term cultural consistencies, in particular the use of English itself as a mainstream spoken and written language dating back to Anglo-Saxon times. “ ̽��ֱ��nation changes, but it has certain structures that continue,” Tombs argues. “England has an ancient structural unity in a way that in Italy, Germany or France do not.”

Taking the same long view reveals that Britain’s power, wealth and global status has been remarkably stable, even though all are typically seen to have failed following the end of the Empire, and decolonisation. When Britain emerged as a significant force in the early 18th century, it was the smallest, and yet the most global, of the world’s half dozen most powerful states. Three centuries later it remains so, outdistanced – like all other states - only by the USA.

Other measures also raise questions about the “declinist” view that British international power has fallen, and its political and social organisation have failed. Britain in the mid-20th century was, for instance, stronger militarily than in the mid-19th, the study observes. In the 1960s it was richer than ever; by 2008 England was second only to the USA among large countries in gross per capita income.

̽��ֱ��book is also critical of the highly centralised nature of Britain’s administration which, it points out, is a relatively recently development – “a seventy year habit that we cannot, or will not, break,” Tombs says. He argues that it leaves British governments having to handle “a neverending conveyor belt of everyday problems”, relating to transport, education, and health, for example, which other countries deliver through local government.

In a complex way this clashes with a long-standing division in the nation’s politics that, unusually, was brought about by the legal recognition given to two religious cultures in England following the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. Unlike other countries, where a single religious denomination tends to have been dominant, England has since the 17th century held Anglicanism on the one hand, and Nonconformism on the other, in tension.

̽��ֱ��study suggests that this unusual situation, of rival religious parties, then evolved new layers. Whig, Liberal and Labour politics were built on foundations of religious Dissent, then took on social and geographical characteristics as the country became divided between the working-class north and wealthier south.

One result of this religious point of origin, Tombs says, is that English politics has a distinctly moral and ideological tone. As a result, the commonplace details handled by a heavily-centralised Government have become the subjects of heated ideological debate – health and education are now disputed in the same terms as slavery or suffrage were in centuries past, when in most other countries they arouse far less emotion.

̽��ֱ��over-arching message of the book is, however, a positive one, suggesting that structural and cultural unity are at the heart of what it means to be English. “We should be fairly optimistic about the future of England, as part of the UK and as a country that will want to reassess itself and will probably gain more autonomy in the coming years,” Tombs added. “ ̽��ֱ��history of England shows that we have, in the long term, been very stable. We are not a nation in decline – and we never really have been.”

̽��ֱ��English and Their History, by Professor Robert Tombs, is published by Allen Lane and is priced at £35.

Inset image: Coronation Street by Allan Lee; Robert Tombs

An epic new history of England offers some eye-catching conclusions on Englishness – suggesting, among other things, that a “remarkable” level of cultural unity and a relative openness to other cultures are both key components of English national identity.

̽��ֱ��history of England shows that we have, in the long term, been very stable. We are not a nation in decline – and we never really have been.

Robert Tombs

Delaware Art Museum / Bridgeman Images.

Detail from the cover image of “ ̽��ֱ��English and Their History”.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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