How Have States Fared In Tackling Coronavirus? An Index Of Administrative Efficiency To Assess Their Performance 

As news arrives that the national lockdown will be extended for a fortnight from 4 May, an assessment of the manner in which the states have combated the Wuhan Virus gains importance.

This is necessary because the very purpose of a lockdown is, to let the states do their duty in containing the Wuhan Virus contagion, without interference.

Have they done that? The answer is that while many of the larger, badly-affected states have indeed rendered yeoman service to our citizens, some have not.

For example, we see that Uttar Pradesh, with all its drawbacks, has responded remarkably well, while the Mamata Banerjee government in West Bengal, sadly, appears to be under the dicey delusion that the pandemic is happening on another planet.

We may think a priori, that such an assessment is obviously a subjective task, since conditions vary from area to area, but the point is that bureaucratic responses are not.

Consequently, it is noted that analyzing the manner in which the states approached the root of the problem – identifying cases, offers a yardstick for comparative appraisal.

This in turn becomes an index of administrative efficiency, from which multiple conclusions may be drawn.

To this end, a parameter adopted was the rate at which states ramped up testing.

Using data from a crowd-sourced website, a state-wise plot of tests-per-million over time offers a surprisingly secular measure of the efficiency demonstrated by each authority – or not.

As can be seen from the image below, all states had to engage in a mad scramble to develop testing capabilities, when the Tablighi Jamaat cluster erupted out of the blue.

Some responded well, others did not.

(Note: the metric of rate of rise of testing per million should not be confused with the number of tests conducted. The two are different)

The first inference is that no one was suitably geared up for testing when the Tablighi Cluster was unearthed. Even Maharashtra, which had been reporting cases sporadically for much of March, was still at the hundred-mark at month-end. Only Kerala was above 200.

But the ramping up began as soon as the bad news burst. States with some advance warning, like Rajasthan and Maharashtra, were able to do so slightly ahead of the others.

Here though, the data shows that Uddhav Thackeray took a full 10 days to get his act together. But once that hiccup was surmounted, Maharashtra improved upon its testing capabilities by an entire order of magnitude within the subsequent three weeks.

In Uttar Pradesh, Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya had candidly admitted, in public, that the state possessed not a single facility when the crisis exploded.

From there, the data shows that the state’s response raised testing numbers up to nearly 300 per million (in a state with a population of over 200 million, and a retrograde past which stopped being funny half a century ago); an impressive march of an order of magnitude, with capacities set to cross their neighbour Madhya Pradesh (MP), in the coming week.

MP was just recovering from a bout of severe maladministration; Kamal Nath was gone, and Shivraj Singh Chauhan was back.

Things were still in rather a mess there. And yet, once again, a BIMARU state (a now-outdated, pejorative term for Bihar, MP, Rajasthan and UP) defied stereotypical, conventional wisdom to tackle the crisis efficiently.

Even Bihar, which was at 24 in early April, is up to 185 now (not shown on chart); that is not quite an order of magnitude rise, but the state is getting there.

Indeed, the bottom line here is that all these four states have responded far more efficiently than expected. The BIMARU tag deserves to be withdrawn – at least on the health administration front.

Gujarat had it the worst, with cases going from miniscule to monstrous in just weeks. Where pre-Tablighi projections expected the state to touch around 300 cases by end-April, they actually went up instead to over 4,000.

Nonetheless, the state machinery has raised its game to match the crisis, with the rate of rise of testing matching Maharashtra and Rajasthan by the third week of April.

But going by this metric, by far the finest response has been from Tamil Nadu. Even if the state took a fortnight to accelerate, Chief Minister Palaniswami and his team have bested the odds to take testing rates to among the highest in the country.

From under 50, the figure went up to over 1,300, and is climbing.

Caveat: this is for large states; Delhi, even though it has a much higher tests-per-million ratio, is an unfair comparison because it is a tiny city state.

An equally laudable effort would be Andhra Pradesh, where the numbers went from 33 to 1,504; if, however, Tamil Nadu is rated higher, it is only because the clusters are more numerous and widespread in the temple state.

On the other hand, Pinarayi Vijayan has seen it fit to only treble this value – from 224 to 703 in Kerala.

The reasons for such sluggishness, and a visible faltering of rate during mid-April, are not known, but the net result is that most of the other states have either crossed Vijayan’s efforts a fortnight ago, or look set to match him soon.

Still, all of this pales in the face of Mamata Banerjee’s administrative measures. At the start of April, her testing rate was less than 7 per million (yes, actually).

A fortnight later, it had reluctantly crept up only to 31 (against Madhya Pradesh, which crossed 100 in the same period).

By some quirk of fate, a fillip was induced by the last week, but at the end of the month, the last reported figure was still below 150. Compare with her neighbours: Assam, which went from 27 to over 200; Bihar – 24 to 185; Jharkhand – 35 to 270; and Odisha – 30 to 691.

The inference here is that if the doubts over epidemic cases in West Bengal were bad, the wholly unsatisfactory lack of rise in testing is worse.

The state government has wasted a full month of lockdown. Where they should have been up to 700 at least, they are not even halfway there presently.

No wonder Naveen Patnaik sealed Odisha’s border with West Bengal. To say more during a time of crisis would be uncharitable.

In conclusion then, the available data, and the selected parameter, shows that while most states have responded to the crisis in a commendable fashion, Mamata Banerjee’s government has not.

This is not just unfortunate, but counterproductive and dangerous as well – both for West Bengal, and the rest of the nation.

Still, since the lockdown has been extended to mid-May, Ms. Banerjee now has a golden second chance to do the right thing; to atone. And this time, the general public has a valid metric to check her redemptive efforts.

Therefore, after even this, if her cabinet still continues to maintain a parametrically lackadaisical attitude towards combating the contagion, then, perhaps, the Union government might have to consider drastic options as urgent public health measures. Let us hope it doesn’t come to that.