The phone that kept ringing

Some numbers stay with you. One of mine is a hundred and fifty: roughly how many calls a day our COVID-19 helpline was taking in 2021, across two Indian states, when oxygen and vaccines were the only things anyone wanted to talk about.

I’d like to say we started with a plan. We didn’t. We started because people around us couldn’t find oxygen for their parents, and because the information that might have helped them already existed. It was just scattered across forwarded messages, district notices and hospital numbers that rang and rang with no answer.

What people were really asking

On paper, the calls were about oxygen and vaccines. In practice, almost every call was a question about information. Which hospital has a bed tonight. Whether a supplier is real or a scam. Which centre has doses, and whether you need to book. Whether the number on a poster still works.

The answers usually existed somewhere. The trouble was they lived in too many places, went out of date within hours, and were hardest to reach for the people who needed them most: older callers, people without smartphones, families in smaller towns a long way from the city hospitals.

So the work became verification. Checking a number before passing it on. Rebuilding lists every few hours because yesterday’s list was already wrong. Learning to say “I don’t know yet, I’ll call you back”, and then actually calling back. That last part mattered more than I expected. Someone who’s frightened can cope with not knowing for an hour if they believe somebody is still working on it. What they can’t cope with is silence.

Information is infrastructure

We usually think of infrastructure as roads, power grids and hospitals. During those weeks I started to think of reliable information as infrastructure too, and of its absence as a kind of collapse that never shows up in photographs.

A hospital with free beds that no one can find is, for the family searching at midnight, the same as a hospital with none.

When I went on to study development policy at LSE, the literature gave me words for what I had seen: information asymmetry, state capacity, last-mile delivery. I’m grateful for the words. But they came second. The phone came first.

What I took from it

Three things have stayed with me.

The first is that trust gets built in the follow-up. Anyone can give out a number. What people remember is whether you came back.

The second is that the gap between a policy and a person is very often a gap in information. A scheme, a subsidy, a scholarship, a vaccine slot: none of them works for someone who doesn’t know it exists, or can’t tell the real offer from the fake one. I see the same gap today in global education, where capable students miss opportunities they were fully qualified for because nobody told them how.

The third is harder to say. A handful of people with phones and a shared list did, for a few weeks, work we would normally expect institutions to do. I find that encouraging, and also a little worrying. A helpline like ours shows people cared. It also shows that something more permanent was missing.

I don’t miss those weeks. But I think about them whenever someone calls a problem purely technical. Most of what I’ve worked on since has the same shape as that phone line. The help is there. The need is there. And in between is a gap that somebody has to decide is their job.

K.