 And our second speaker is Mrs. Sharda Murlidran, who is an officer with the Indian Administrative Service and is currently Principal Secretary for Local Self-Government with the Government of Kerala. And Mrs. Murlidran has previously served as the Executive Director of Kurumbashree, which is Kerala's flagship program for women's empowerment and poverty eradication. She's also had a stint with the Central Government in New Delhi with the Panchayati Raj Ministry, which is a local government ministry. Murlidran, you know, Kerala has a strong historical track record of well functioning local governments. And if you could make your remarks, putting that in context, and then speaking about the specific role of local governments, Professor Heepan alluded to some of those. You know that this incredible statistic a few days ago about how all the local governments at one point of time were running, you know, some 1,300 community kitchens and in a span of some 45 days managed to serve a total of 8.6 million individuals. And many of these were run in coordination with Kurumbashree, a program that you managed some years ago. And further linked to the point that Professor Heepan made about Kerala already had local disaster management plans in place. And you know that further bolstered your relief efforts. So, ma'am, the floor is yours to sort of elaborate on these aspects as well as other issues. Thank you. I would like to start with just responding to a question I saw in between, which is about what are the figures really? I mean, what is it that makes, what is it about Kerala? So let me just skip the figures as on date. I don't have the exact figures, but we have about, we were the first date in the country to be hit by the coronavirus. It's the end of January. So for us, we are right now entering our fifth month of tackling this virus. And it has come in three waves. So far, the first wave end of January to early February got over very quickly. It was very limited and we were able to control it. Then we had international arrivals bringing the virus and soon the numbers got to escalate. So, but we had reached a point of about 500 cases. The interesting thing. Again, at that point of time, we started as being the only state and then slowly other states started joining in Delhi and Mumbai. The cities started coming in at that point of time, you would lead us in numbers as far as COVID, the number of COVID positive cases was gone. Now, what has been also interesting about Kerala has been the very low rate of fatalities. We had, it was 500 cases, we had four fatalities, three to four fatalities. So this was, this is the scenario till the 4th of May. And then after the 4th of May when the lockdown was released, was relaxed considerably and international and domestic travel was allowed, the numbers just shot up again in Kerala. So the, in this while over three and a half months, we had about 500 cases. Now in the span of two, three weeks, we've had another 500 plus cases that have come in. And the majority of them over 90% of these cases are actually cases which have come to us from other places from either the rest of the country or from abroad carrying the virus. Contact cases inside the state is fairly small. So the number active, of the active cases, we've got about 17 which are, which are contact, which have come out of, connect with the people who had the virus. So that's the context and the number of deaths has now gone up to eight or so. So why and how did Kerala manage what was its strategy, what was different about it? I would like to put an immediate context to how the strategy of management has been. And one immediate context, one very important learning for Kerala, I mean, it's been about its lived experience. The first lived experience that played a vital role in how Kerala responded to this pandemic was Nipah. In 2018, we had a horrible Nipah outbreak in which the fatality rate was about 78%. We need to contrast that with 2% or 3% of Corona. So it was some, it just came out of the blue, we didn't know how to handle it. But learning from Nipah, what Kerala, actually the health system of Kerala, learned to fine tune the art of contact tracing. It was about identifying, isolating, intense monitoring and aggressive containment. Now this was a strategy that Nipah really created a protocol for Kerala. And this is a, I mean, of course there were a lot of learnings from the WHO guidelines as well. But this was something that was activated almost as soon, immediately upon the first case of Corona being detected. This is one context. Another context is the disaster management plans. Now in 2018, when the big floods hit Kerala, once in a century floods, we were completely unprepared. Of course it was a strong response and that the local governments also were, the fact that you had very strong local governments on the ground helped the response. But even then, there was quite a bit of chaos and disorganization and also lack of appreciation of what to do, of what were our fallback support systems that were available, where do you hunt for rope or boats or machines to clear things up. So with that in mind, when the Rebel Kerala initiative was put out, one of the initiatives that the state government did was to say that in the annual planning exercise of local governments, let us bring in a disaster, a community-led disaster management plan. Of course, locating it in the last year of the elected governments in Kerala, we had, we were interested also in jogging the community memory of the lived experience so that we could take lessons from that and incorporate that into our disaster identification of vulnerable communities, looking at relief operations and also looking at what should be mitigation interventions. We also did, but created out of this exercise, we created documents. And these documents had a complete inventorization of human resources at the local level. It also had an inventorization of the infrastructure. So from JCBs to boats to pickaxes, you know, you had to, who had yards of rope to provide to x-ray machines, ventilators, ICUs, who are they, who are the contacts, what are the details. So that information was actually in place. So out of our thousand odd local governments, at least 800 of them had documents with them, which had done a proper inventorization, had to contact details of the people of emergency response teams were also identified and their contacts, etc., were available with them. A third interesting thing is, and again, just completely unrelated, the government this year in its budget announcement came out with a 12-point program for local governments. And interestingly, that included budget hotels, Genegia hotels, they called them to be operated by a good machine, which would serve food at very affordable rates and would also have a provision of providing free food for people who could not afford to pay, which would be raised through sponsorships. They had a scheme which was looking at elderly care. They also had a local economic assurance program, which was saying that one in five families, one member out of five, we should be targeting looking at employment opportunity. So from the primary productive sector to MSMEs, that initiative and that push had already been there. So this was the backdrop against which we are entering the COVID phase. So when COVID hit us, it was very easy to locate local self-government in an augmented role for COVID response coming out of previous experience and also going through the whole process of training, understanding and working on what should be community, the appropriate community response to a disaster. Naturally, we had not thought of health disasters, although we had, you know, passingly referred to the possibility of epidemics as well. Nevertheless, this became, this came in very handy and there was this legacy of the whole decentralization experience in Kerala, where, you know, when Panjaitir Raj came out, Kerala was one state which went into full-fledged, full-throated devolution of responsibilities, powers and resources, which meant functionary, you transferred institutions. So the health institutions at the local level were transferred to local governments. And the local governments have 25% of the entire plan budget is available as funds for local governments to plan. And this is over and above the plans that they raised through internal resources, their taxation and licensing and all of that. So it needs to be seen that you had fairly empowered local governments which were at work here. So with this, what was it that the local governments were made to do? It helped, of course, that we had the chief minister and the opposition leader have addressed all the local governments in the state through video conferencing facility to get them to talk them through what was expected of them. So we start off with, you know, in the early days, it was about stakeholder engagement. It was about, as Professor Isha said, you know, it was about, you know, as Professor Eepen had mentioned, to break the chain campaign, which was the physical dissensing. And so this sensitization, how you do break the chain campaign, mobilization of volunteers and targeting vulnerable groups. So you targeted the slum dweller, the fissures, migrant labor, and here we call them guest workers. So it'll be saying guest workers from our guest workers as well as their employers. And targeting senior citizens and people with co-morbidities, because they would be, they were seen as highly vulnerable communities. Targeting care homes and care providers, because again by virtue of, so Kerala has a very strong system, perhaps the strongest of palliative care, community-led palliative care. So targeting them because they would also be both the care, the person receiving care and the care giver were at risk. And then the delivery boys. So, you know, the restorers, the auto rickshaw drivers, the delivery boys, all of these people were also seen as points of high contact and therefore vulnerable. And messages had gone out on how you do the break the chain campaign with all of these people. So this is one very important intervention, early intervention that was done by local governments. And then of course, the NEPA based contact tracing, the aggressive structural response for contact tracing. So at that point of time, every person who was coming in from outside was, you know, you had their contacts identified. So the primary contacts and secondary contacts to give you a sense of proportion for every person who was identified as perhaps a suspect, their primary and secondary contacts were identified. And once these people turned positive, the others had to go into quarantine. So which meant that we were looking at about 70 to 80 people for one, every one suspect of positive case who was hospitalized. And at a point in time, we had gone up to more than 2.5 lakh people who are under home observation, voluntary observation. But this was done and this was monitored tracked by the local governments. How did they do it? They had rapid response teams on the ground and this was followed up by ward level committees. Now there are about 20,000 wards. So every ward basically had ward level committees. Of course in the early days, it was only about 20 to 30% of the wards of the state had to, had home isolation cases. Today, however, we've got, because we're doing daily tracking, 75% of all the wards of the state have ward level committees and have cases of home isolation and quarantine. That's the extent of quarantine we have. Right now the numbers are touching 1.2 lakh. So that's, you know, 120,000, over 120,000 people are under home quarantine today. So this data was also entered shared now. November in Kerala, all the local governments are, you know, connected internet enabled. They've been doing a lot of their work online. So once this happened, it was important and they, you know, the conversations, their meetings also started going online. Instead of doing regular physical meetings with people coming together physically, the meetings got to be online. Help tests were set up and phone numbers provided. So that kind of arrangement had been done. And this is, I'm talking about all, across all the local governments, urban rural, which is again the characteristic of the pandemic here, that we, you know, you don't really have an urban hotspot. Today we have about 102 hotspots of which only about five or six of them are urban. The rest of them are actually in the rural areas. So there is an urban rural continuum, which you would see here. So now looking at what was the lockdown responsive local governments. We would be talking of a doing a complete survey, local survey of vulnerable high risk persons, guest workers sitting above community kitchens, which he talked about managing the guest worker camps because once people started coming out, you looked at the guest workers camp. You did an assessment there. And then you also looked at where the facilities were not good or where they seem to be unhappy with it. They were moved to government facilities. We first provided them with food out of the community kitchen and realized that they didn't want food. They wanted provisions. So then we immediately shifted to provisions for them. The community kitchens also catered to stranded people and destitutes because the lockdown kept a lot, got a lot of, froze a lot of people midway. Handling all those people who didn't have an address earlier to go, taking them off the road, giving them, keeping them safe was important. Lifting abrasions and coordinating the entire food kit delivery, which was done to, which was available to most all Russian card holders. The distance response to because you had calls saying that I run out of medicine and I'm a kidney patient and I need my medicine. So organizing that the medicine supply, there could have been personal emergency, somebody at a depth somewhere was unable to travel. So working on that and also hunger calls. You might have from affluent families, senior citizens families who suddenly the maids stopped coming to work. Suddenly there was no ration. There was no food in the house. And they also needed to be responded to. So that kind of thing. So that kind of thing. So that kind of thing. Plus organizing the dispersant of social security pensions, which was mentioned. And then came the COVID care centers, which are a quarantine centers, you know, the inventorization, preparation, management of these centers. Under the ages of the local government. And now we are also getting ready for preparation of the first line treatment centers. In case there is a surge anywhere. We don't want the hospital systems to be overwhelmed and we don't want to be overwhelmed. So that's the nature of distribution of mass sanitizer. So, but also the disposal, because that is again a question of now you had a lot of biomedical waste, which is getting generated. And how do you dispose of that safely? Waste management, of course, plus the fact that we, you know, rents license fees, other dues had to be weighed, which meant that the local governments were eating very heavily into their own resources. And that's when the government decided to free up the government for all these purposes as well. Now, there's a post lockdown response also. You know, once the restrictions got lifted, people were suddenly hit with the realization that, you know, you could be in for food insecurity in the days to come. Kerala is a consumer state. It's dependent heavily on other states for food and food materials. So now we find that there is a huge audience out there, a target group out there who wants to cultivate in their homesteads. And so it has launched a program for food security and augmentation of local productivity. Hopefully that will also lead to employment generation, which is fellow land and homestead cultivation, focus on milk, egg, meat, inland fish production, value addition as well by way of activities, providing technical support systems to make all of this happen, converging the schemes of all these various departments under the ages of the local governments, augmentation of local procurement as well as the local market facilities. And we are expecting a huge influx of people from the Gulf, unemployed people, people who lost their jobs. So looking at absorption of this new unemployed and financially stressed people into productive activity. So all of that right now local governments are very seriously engaged with. So putting local governments on hold there and moving on to Kudumistri where does the Kudumistri network and the community network come into all of this. So to explain what Kudumistri is, it's a federated structure of self-help groups, we call them, we call them neighborhood groups, who have been federated at the ward level into area development societies and at the local development level as what is known as community development societies or CDS. And these are federated so it's all women run structures. So it's a, so 4.4 million women are in this network and that means 4.4 million families are linked and that which was what you were mentioning about 60% therefore of Kerala's families are in. One of the first things they did and the importance of Kudumistri and what makes it distinct from other similarly placed federations elsewhere is it's connected to the local governments. This is the only one federated structure which is completely immersed inside the local government. So the local government has, I mean they fill the grams of us they are part of the working groups of the local governments. The local governments use them, connect with them for various activities. So there is this huge synergy between the local community and the local government. One of the things that we've been trying to do is also to make them the citizen body, the voice of the citizen community, the rights orientation and make the local governments accountable to citizenship through a network of enabled women. So that's the, there is that very, very organic connection that the community network has and this presence of the community network to give an example is that 95%, we have about 20,000 wards both urban and rural and 95% of them have ward level structures of Kudumistri network. So that's how huge the spread is universal across the state. And there are also a large number of joint liability groups of women farmers. There is, and there are some community response systems. You have a something a volunteer system which you know it's a system of community health workers. You've got this Nehita Collinville which is community councillors. You've got gender resource persons out there. And so these networks have all come into the system of the local government response. And then you look at the frontline health worker, the ASHA, most of them are from the Kudumistri network. So there is again that connection which comes in. So when you look at the areas in which Kudumistri has been involved, one is the volunteer mobilization itself. So 78,000 women, 78,000 women are in have been mobilized as volunteers for various activities. And this is not counting the regular Kudumistri network. And these have been, this says it's about for every grand pajaya that is village body, village government, you've got about 50 women workers who have come out for volunteering. They come into local mass production distribution. They've helped in running of the community kitchens. They've helped in doing the home surveillance and connecting with people under isolation. They have done community counselling. They've also been involved with disinfection and base management. That is one area of activity. You've got community based surveys that you talked about. So be it senior citizen assessment or people under palliative care or people with morbidities, guest worker camps and facilities. And even the skill set survey of the guest workers that has been done by Kudumistri has been involved with this. The community surveillance that I talked about, very intensive participation on their part. And the neighborhood groups have been active in even communicating the medical needs of people who are not under observation. Senior citizens of people with morbidities in the locality, that information is reaching the local system through the Kudumistri network. It's one of the first things that Kudumistri did when the pandemic hit was to ensure that everybody in the network was connected to WhatsApp groups. So WhatsApp groups were created of the energies of the area development societies of the series, so that the information flow would be seamless, which was an incredible thing to do. So to start IEC activities, you needed to get into that. And then messages started going down through the neighborhood group network. We had, before the lockdown, we had actually planned for an entire discussion of what to do and not to do and how to get into coming into surveillance to understanding of COVID from all angles. Unfortunately, we couldn't organize that because the weekend that we planned the neighborhood group meetings was the day we had the first lockdown instruction from the central government followed almost immediately by the completely lockdown. So that didn't happen and therefore we had to switch into online mode almost immediately. The competitions, you know, the activities which Professor Epin was talking about, we've got a community of children also who are associated, we call them the Baal Sabhaas. And, you know, so keeping them engaged, getting them into activities, so TikTok, Vishu competitions, organizing them so that there was Manor Engine and Entertainment under lockdown and that there was also stress buster activities or something that the industry coordinated in a great way. And the series themselves, they had their own homegrown videos, they made their own songs, you had thousands of industry songs on how to, you know, take some popular songs and converting them into COVID response, that kind of activity. So after this comes the factor of economic activity and resilience, the, you know, the community kitchens have now closed, but the budget hotels remain. So the good industry has out of the community kitchens too, about 400 budget hotels have been, have sprouted across the state and we're hoping that in two months time that's going to touch thousands, that we'll have it all over the place, which is about making affordable food available to people and also to service institutional quarantine and home quarantine as and when required and any distress signal that comes up in collaboration with the local companies. The joint liability groups who have been geotagged and registered they have already been about doing fellow land survey and getting involved with the agricultural production activities. There's been an interest free loan 2000 crore loan which was and which was mentioned again by Professor Epin that has been mobilized that is targeting good industry the demand of good industry and so that interest the mobilization processing of application again all of this done online without without there they're being able to meet and they've gone to the banks now we're trying to get the banks to get the money out so that that work is ongoing right now now having said this I would just like to flag a few issues you know all this seems very nice and hunky-dory but there are of course concerns now one concern is that you know it's it's a thing we the state government and even the mission the good industry mission we all love to use good industry so it is an instrument that we use at our will it is cheap later and you know volunteers now I had a I heard about the joint liability groups farm produce having been given donated to the community kitchens and then I realized that you know these were people who were undergoing financial stress themselves and of course there must have been some level of coercion or pressure that ended up with them doing this so you are actually making them foot the bill and people who are already hit footing the bill so these are some of the dangers that you have of this kind of mobilization and control and association and you know we need to realize very often that this paves the way for somebody who's become a right-spaced organization to slip into becoming just you know an object of patronage and instrumentality and not and somewhere the agency is lost and it's important right now for us to ensure that the agency is something that we are able to to retain or refurbish there is the fact that we are also exposing them they are by virtue of putting them out there in the frontline we are also making them vulnerable so the state really needs to think in terms of insurance and protection and support for this which we haven't really done at this point of time and there is this multiple burden of work and performance which was mentioned by even so I'm not going into that further but one other issue you know working in the local self-governments and their strength has been something which has enabled convergence in Kerala across departments it's something which you find not happening most of the time because of the fact that there is very strict departmentalism and you know and controlled it's a command performance usually disaster management is generally a command performance and it is no matter what even here it ends up being a command performance but what command performances do is that they leave the ground open for command structures to come into place and it's very important to guard against that when we talk convergence the local governments are working on convergence but then there is a problem of association between various departments and various wings of government of the elected body and the various officers of the officers in the community and very often the burden of handling all that of managing all that falls on the community and that is an extremely severe stress point we know that we can see that fatigue and we are just wondering how do we you know how do we bring them out of this how do we keep them resilient in the words of again Professor Avin thank you