coronavirus

Communists

gram panchayat

Corona

Michael Moore

CM Pinarayi Vijayan’s strategic thinking is better and faster than any CEO’s.For the last nine days, the verified personal Twitter account of Pinarayi Vijayan, the chief minister of Kerala, has kept a singular focus on the #Covid-19 pandemic, and its devilish surge. His tweets contain advocacy, assurance, appeals, actions, decisions and updates. His other official account, CMO Kerala, too, has maintained a ditto focus. Social media accounts could be a simplistic indicator, but the work that his government has undertaken on the ground is simply enormous.It would be warped to apply corporate standards to this Communist, but if someone is hell-bent, they would quickly realise that Vijayan’s response time, his strategic thinking, communication, coordination, and delegation of work have been astoundingly better, and faster than that of any CEO. As per a report, testing of samples forin Kerala was the highest at 1,897 as of March 16; that is more than double of the next best state, Karnataka, where the first death happened. In fact, there cannot be a measure for Vijayan’s efficiency in the corporate world, because corporations do not fight to contain epidemics, neither do they run coalition governments nor deal with diverse demographics.But a sort of comparison is possible with his counterpart in Karnataka, BS Yediyurappa, who ditched his own government’s social distancing directives to attend a lavish wedding of a BJP legislator’s son, on March 15. The prime minister in Delhi may not have shown such insouciance, but still, he looked pretty distracted. Vijayan’s letter to him on March 14 suggests this. A letter from the Ministry of Home Affairs that morning had allowed states to utilise the State Disaster Response Fund (SDRF) for responding to Covid-19, but another letter, the same evening, modified certain beneficial provisions of the fund. Vijayan shot back that instant: “By deleting these clauses, the spirit behind relief/assistance intended by SDRF is defeated. The deleted two clauses… need to be restored.” Next day, March 15, the PM got busy discussing ‘timely action’ with SAARC countries, while ironically it was being thwarted in Kerala.For a few decades now, Kerala has got its public health and social branding right. It has been consistently marked ‘progressive’ not on the basis of perception but performance and data. Be it the handling of the Nipah virus, rehabilitation and reconstruction after the floods, gender rights, media autonomy, fiscal federalism or local governance, their progress has been ahead of the curve. Karnataka too, at one point, was known for its social legislations, and decentralisation of governance, but of late it has made news only for its political surgeries in resorts and mammon worship.Often, Kerala’s success has been attributed to its literacy. That may be a factor, but literacy is no substitute for collective common sense, and a well-defined political culture. Literacy rates in Karnataka too are decent, but interestingly, surveys have found its technological crowd to be socially conservative, and regional imbalance is an epic tale.Some may attribute Kerala’s success to the, but that’s not entirely true. Even the Congress behaves differently in the state, and a certain north Indian MP who was elected from Waynad in 2019 must be experiencing the cultural difference. There is a governance and administrative continuity in the state like in no other, and political coalitions have been a boon. In many states the illiteracy of one regime gets disrupted by the nuance of another, not so in Kerala. This is apparent in the growth of health infrastructure and reasonably assured autonomy at thelevel. There are two primary health centres every 3.95 km when the national average is one for every 7.3 km. Karnataka threw away its early local governance advantage by willy-nilly making an MLA the nucleus of its development model.A recent report by an initiative collectively led by Gates Foundation, WHO, World Bank and UNICEF, attributed health gains made in Kerala to consistent emphasis on public health and primary health care, health infrastructure, financial planning, girls’ education, community participation, and decentralised governance, besides “a willingness to improve systems in response to identified gaps”.In this hour ofcrisis, three stunning innovations that Kerala has done deserve more than just platitudinal admiration. One, when they were confronted with shortage of masks, they got the prisons to manufacture them on a war-footing. Second, with schools shut, they delivered mid-day meals to kids at their homes, and three, they developed flowcharts of each Covid-confirmed patients, which tracked their movement by the hour – a genius act. This helped, especially in Pathanamthitta, the ground zero of the outbreak. Of course, the diligence of the health minister, KK Sailaja or Sailaja Teacher, is now lore.It may be a horrendous comparison, but still, Kerala perhaps sits like a Cuba, pricking the conscience of Delhi and the rest of the states on health care. One should watch’s 2007 documentary, ‘Sicko’, to understand how the US was shamed by the welfare crown of Cuba.