Events

The November 1970 Bhola cyclone in East Pakistan remains the deadliest natural disaster ever recorded, with an estimated death toll of 300,000 - 500,000 people. By assembling satellite data on variation in storm intensity across sub-districts, we provide empirical evidence that the cyclone's devastation and the Pakistani government's callous response to it were instrumental in galvanizing support for an independence movement that resulted in the formation of Bangladesh in 1971. The government failed to provide aid to the majority of cyclone-affected districts. We find heightened political activism and support for the separatist Awami League in cyclone-affected areas in the 1970 Pakistan general elections held one month after the cyclone hit, especially in the subset of those districts that did not receive relief. Using newly assembled archival records, we show that recognized "freedom fighters'' who fought in the Bangladesh Liberation War that started in March 1971 were disproportionately drawn from those same cyclone-affected districts. Further, the Pakistan military retaliated in December 1971 by targeting their murders of Bengali intellectuals who were born in those same cyclone-affected areas. Our statistical evidence using large-sample geospatial data supports a leading historical hypothesis that the Pakistani state's indifferent response to the cyclone's devastation crystallized the need for greater autonomy that eventually led to the formation of a new nation-state. Events like large-scale natural disasters reveal the characteristics of leadership by giving citizens an opportunity to observe their response. Disasters also create focal points that unify disparate groups and allow them to coordinate protest activities in certain times and places taking advantage of the safety in numbers. This ultimately catalyzed Bangladesh's independence movement, and repressive counter-measures by the Pakistani state.

Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak is the Jerome Kasoff ’54 Professor of Management and Economics at Yale University with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics (Faculty of Arts and Sciences). Mobarak is the founder and faculty director of the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE).

Mobarak has several ongoing research projects in Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, and Nepal. He conducts field experiments exploring ways to induce people in developing countries to adopt technologies or behaviors that are likely to be welfare-improving. He also examines the complexities of scaling up development interventions that are proven effective in such trials. For example, he is scaling and testing strategies to address seasonal poverty using migration subsidies or consumption loans in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Indonesia. This 15-minute presentation at the Nobel Symposium with accompanying slides summarizes his views on migration research. His research has been published in journals across disciplines, including Science, Nature, Econometrica, American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, BMJ, the American Political Science Review, PNAS, Marketing Science, and Demography, and covered by the New York Times, The Economist, NPR, BBC, NBC, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Science, Nature, and other media outlets around the world. He received a Carnegie Fellowship in 2017 and was named to the inaugural Vox list of 50 “scientists working to build a more perfect future” in 2022.

Mobarak collaborated with the government of Bangladesh and other institutions to devise evidence-based COVID response strategies in 2020. He collaborated with governments and NGOs in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh to distribute facemasks to over 100 million people during the Delta and Omicron waves in 2021, based on the results of the NORM model. He began collaborating with the government of Sierra Leone on vaccine distribution in 2022, and set up an institutional partnership with WHO in 2023 to work on behavioral sciences for public health in Jamaica, Sierra Leone and other WHO member states. This 15-minute presentation at the World Bank summarizes his COVID-period work in developing countries

Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics