A tracker, based on data from 73 countries, that calculates governments' response to Covid-19 has identified India's response as one of the most stringent in the world. Created by researchers from Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, the "Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker" is designed to systematically record government responses worldwide and aggregate the scores into a common 'Stringency Index'.

The tracker is based on indicators such as school closures, travel bans as well as measures such as emergency investment in healthcare, fiscal measure and investment in vaccines by the governments.

Some of the other countries to score a perfect 100 in the tracker are Israel, Mauritius, New Zealand and South Africa.

Czech Republic, Itay, Lebanon and France scored in the 90s in the index. Germany and the United States have scored below these countries in the 80s, while the United Kindom scored in 70s.

However, the index does not represent the effectiveness of these measures as countries such as China, South Korea and Singapore which have been successful in flattening the pandemic curve, do not feature among the top countries in the index.

The tracker collects publicly available information on 11 indicators, however, it does not look at the ground level implementation of these indicators.

A statement released by the team behind the tracker said, "The data is collected from publicly available information by a cross-disciplinary Oxford University team of academics and students from every part of the world."

Thomas Hale, Associate Professor at the Blavatnik School of Government, who leads this project, said, "Our index cannot, of course, tell the full story, but we believe the data we have collected can help decision-makers and public health professionals examine the robustness of government responses and provide the first step into understanding exactly what measures have been effective in certain contexts, and why." The tracker is designed to keep updating governments' response as the situation progresses.

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