Which states are really doing the best job fighting the Wuhan Corona virus?

Those were amazing days. When I would wake up in the morning and check my email the first thing in the day. These days, there is a higher priority task. Waking up and going to check the total number of new cases in India in the last one day. The website that I have grown to trust is covid19india.org. If you ask me, it has the best presentation of data, broken down appropriately by state, district, by date, showing the increases  as the day progresses and so on. The one thing they are missing is a ticker showing the number of tests done.

So for the purposes of this post, I will be using the state by state data I have from there. It is really time to do an objective assessment of state governments without using a partisan lens. Remember that health is after all a state subject. And most of the measures supposedly announced by the Central Govt are really advisories to state governments. Because all the actual implementation is to be done by the state. And for the most part, even the executive power to make decisions lies with them. For example, it is up to the state governments to announce lockdowns and curfews and enforce them with police. Few realize that the Central government doesn’t even have the authority to lock down any state or district. At best it can stop inter state travel. The Central govt probably has some amount of leverage over National Highways. Of course it can shut down the railway and the airports. But beyond that, pretty much everything has to be enforced by the hand of the state government. Even the list of essential services to be excluded is totally up to the state government.

India really is a union of states. That’s federalism. If you go back to the origins of federalism in the United States, you might be surprised to learn that the office of the President of the United States was never meant to be the big exalted position it has come to be. Rather the founding fathers of America visualized the President as a glorified bureaucrat, doing some routine work on coordinating between states. In fact, citizens in Washington DC don’t even get to vote in national elections. DC was supposed to be a small town, with little power and little reason for people to live there.

Sorry for the digression. It is not easy to judge the state governments through a non-partisan lens, but I will do my best. So here is the statewise list of confirmed cases.

I personally believe that the way to judge a state is to compare its risk exposure to the number of cases. For example, while states like Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha or Bihar may have a tiny number of cases, you have to account for the fact that they are not as exposed to international thoroughfares.

While Uddhav Thackeray is getting tons of undeserved praise owing to his new found status as secular darling, we have to admit he has a tough state to run here. Maharashtra is the state most exposed to global business chains.

If you ask me, the first rank should definitely go to Goa!

Just 7 cases! Think about the number of foreigners going in and out of Goa. The place could have been severely affected and turned into another Mumbai quite easily. But it did not. Now, you could point out that Goa also benefits from a higher standard of living and general urbanization. But if the Wuhan Corona virus has shown anything, it is that being urban is a disadvantage. The city of New York is on it knees. So are most European capitals. Being a city is the most unsafe thing right now.  However way you look at this, Chief Minister Pramod Sawant has done a tremendous job here.

For second place, I’d like to propose a three way tie between Karnataka (175), Punjab (91) and Gujarat (165). 

The three states are very comparable. All three are heavily exposed to influx of foreigners. Again, Bangalore could easily have become a Mumbai. And Karnataka is caught between Maharashtra and Kerala, the two most difficult places in India right now. Similarly, there is Gujarat, which has its huge NRI base and lots of traffic going in and out of Mumbai. It is almost amazing that the Mumbai hotspot has not already swept up southern Gujarat, especially Surat. Similarly, Punjab has its huge NRI base. As Kerala has shown, a huge NRI base can become a nightmare at this time.

It is quite an extraordinary effort on part of these state governments that the numbers in these states still look very manageable. As for population, Punjab comes in around 3 crore people, while Karnataka and Gujarat come in around 6 crore people. The total number of cases in Karnataka or Gujarat are also roughly twice as Punjab. Near perfect comparison, I would say.

Next, there is Uttar Pradesh (305).

Let’s quickly assess the natural disadvantages that UP has.

(1) Huge population: With over 20 crore people, the number of cases from UP would have been large pretty much no matter what.

(2) Closeness to Delhi : Again, Delhi being an international city, the NCR region was always going to become a dangerous place. Even more when you account for the fact that a lot of rich Delhi folks actually live in Uttar Pradesh. In this moment of irony, being around rich globetrotting people is dangerous.

And here are the natural advantages

(1) Huge rural swathes

(2) So called BIMARU state, with weak government finances and health infrastructure.

In the balance between the two factors, I’d say Yogi Adityanath has done a fair job overall, the best being how he managed the labor exodus.

Remember how media tried to nuke his government with stories of migrant laborers. You might have noticed these stories died down despite best efforts of liberal media. Means Yogi really did an exemplary job of managing the migrant labor exodus. If he had done anything less, you know the media would have spared no effort to tear him down.

Now, it is time for general remarks about the “middle order” states. This is where I’d place Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Rajasthan.

All of these states have done well in patches. In fact, all of India has done quite well. Like I said, Maharashtra and Delhi were dealt a cruel hand. Delhi was initially doing fine, but their efforts were simply railroaded by the Nizamuddin incident. As in Tamil Nadu, where the numbers have soared, almost entirely due to that incident. Rajasthan was dealt a heavy blow in Bhilwara, but they clamped down hard and now Bhilwara hasn’t seen a single case in over 3 days. Even Kerala government stepped off the PR peddling for a few days and decided to focus on work. The numbers have slowed down significantly since then.

I am mostly going to be silent on states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh, as also the North Eastern states. These states benefit immensely in the current scenario from being “far off” from the national business mainstream. And while the CMs of these states deserve congratulations for keeping the disease mostly out of their borders, they just haven’t been tested in the way states like Maharashtra or Karnataka or Gujarat have.

I will however say which are the two bottom states in my opinion. One is Madhya Pradesh and the other is Bengal. While Madhya Pradesh had many of the “advantages” like being rural and outside the business mainstream, it has a disappointingly large number of cases at 268. It’s really touch and go between Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Rajasthan has got a grip on things after losing its way initially, Madhya Pradesh still has to show it can slow the surge.

Obviously, Bengal is at the bottom. A disaster of a state, led by a disaster of a leader. The state might enjoy the dubious distinction of being the only place where number of deaths due to Wuhan Coronavirus is actually going down, not up! How? Because Didi formed a committee of babus to audit the deaths so far. And the official death toll has been revised down from 7 to 3. At a time we need real info in real time, Didi is playing office-office. Somebody save Bengal.

But overall, I have kind words for every administrator in India. Even Didi. There’s nothing easy about dealing with a pandemic. There’s no playbook. We have seen the world’s richest countries brought to their knees before this virus. In the face of that terrifying reality, Team India has done a wonderful job staying afloat.

And I am willing to be non-partisan and say that clearly, appreciating every single Chief Minister, from Mamata Banerjee and Pinarayi Vijayan to B S Yediyurappa and Yogi Adityanath. Even though I know that no liberal who happens to read this will ever appreciate a single thing done by a BJP Chief Minister or by PM Modi.

And that they will never admit that the lockdown is working.