THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Reserve Bank of India has lauded Kerala’s Covid-19 containment strategy, attributing the success to empowered local self-governments (LSGs) and a robust healthcare system.In its annual report, ‘State Finances — A Study of Budgets of 2020-21’, the central bank noted that the state “successfully managed to contain the spread of the pandemic in the first wave of infections”.
It further read: “The state now ranks third in active cases (as on October 13, 2020) and also has the highest percentage of active cases to total confirmed cases.
However, Kerala reports a lower death rate at 0.3 per cent compared to the all-India average of 1.5 per cent. With the surge in new cases, Kerala is actively roping in the services of the LSGs in its fight against the pandemic.”
Kerala’s efforts in the last two decades to empower LSGs through devolution of financial resources, political and administrative power have put the LSGs in a better position to deal with Covid-19, the report said.
“Kerala’s 1,200-strong LSGs worked in tandem with the state government to create effective interventions during the Covid-19 crisis. Intensive contact tracing and case isolation followed by the LSGs succeeded in containing large-scale community transmission of the infection,” it noted.
The report delves deeper into various roles of the LSGs like spreading awareness, implementation of quarantine and lockdown guidelines, and reaching essential services to people under quarantine.
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“Panchayats have emerged as the frontline institutions in containing the disease and in alleviating the distress caused to the poor and vulnerable,” the RBI report said.
The central bank’s study said that a robust healthcare system helped the state to keep the Covid mortality relatively low. The state has significantly higher healthcare spending per capita than all other states, driven by higher-than- average government spending as well as out-of-pocket spending.
These helped the state in the “handling of the Nipah outbreak as well as in keeping mortality from Covid relatively low despite unfavourable demographics.”The report also hints that the pandemic would adversely hit the state’s economy because of its significantly higher proportion of population in the above-60 age cohort compared to the national average.