 Kerala has been an exception to the dominant COVID story in India and unlike you know the tragic humanitarian crisis that continues to unravel in other parts of India, Kerala arguably had an early humane and an effective response to controlling the pandemic and we can we can of course go into all of the reasons as to why Kerala did what it did but what we try and attempt to do in this webinar is to look at two what I think are very critical and important elements of Kerala's response to COVID and one is the role of an incredible network of some 4.3 million women in Kerala. Kerala's population itself is around 34, 35 million so more than 10% of Kerala, the Konupashree covers around 60% of Kerala's households so the critical role played by this network of women's collectives and the second aspect is the important role played by Kerala's local governments both in sort of rural and in urban sort of areas. Our first speaker will be Professor Mridhu Lipan who is currently a member of the Kerala State Planning Board where she is an expert on gender and social justice issues. She was formerly professor at the Center for Development Studies where she continues to serve as an honorary fellow. Professor Lipan, can you speak a bit about you know putting this in the political context in Kerala which you know sort of informed its sort of response to COVID and then maybe elaborate on the impacts of the pandemic on women and in your work you argue that development is not gender-neutral and I assume you would have the same position on the pandemic as well. You know that it impacts women and men into different ways and from that perspective if you could elaborate on the state response and the role of the Konupashree network in mitigating the impacts of COVID and the lockdown, the economic lockdown on women so Professor Lipan the floor is yours. Kerala's response to COVID and of course focusing on women, their resilience and role in relief and revival, the government policy response to address women's needs and the challenges in the post-COVID period. Now before I go any further since we're talking of women, I have to acknowledge the one woman who played the most critical role in containing and controlling the pandemic in initial stages and that is our Minister for Health, Social Justice and Women and Child Development. She is a teacher and she's also my Minister in the sense that social justice and women and child development are areas she did with in the planning board. I don't have to say much about what she has done because the world has acknowledged her achievements. Now so I would like to acknowledge the very critical role that a woman played in this response to the COVID. Now given the time I have I can't go into much details even of the political context but it is very necessary to contextualize it to be able to understand why things happen the way they happen in Kerala and perhaps it's not a lesson which can be replicated very easily because it has a historical legacy but it is something which people have to start thinking about you know that because it's very important if you have to have participatory ways of managing crises. So what is this of the first issue that I'm going to talk about is what is this Kerala's historical legacy of public action. Now we know that Kerala's achievements show that people's well-being can be improved and social and political cultural conditions transform even at low levels of income when there is appropriate public action. Now what do I mean by that the action of mass organizations and mass movements and their pressure against social political economic oppression in which women have also played a very critical role fighting for their social and labor rights and the policy actions of governments that means there is a pressure from below and there is policy actions of the governments from above which have been the most important constituents of public action. What Amartya Sen has called public action from below and above. Now facilitating this sort of mobilization and mass organizations Kerala's development performance a feature of that development performance has been that there are no great disparities between achievements in the urban and rural areas that of course is partly also because of the fact that public policy is so targeted and the fact of its habitation pattern. So that also makes it easier for people to be mobilized and to be you know fight for their rights. So mobilization was so much easier. Now I'm not going into the history of the educational social and health reforms. I mean the educational and social reforms the important point about that was how they were actually linked you know the educational reforms and the social reforms. The social reforms involved also Narayana Guru for the for the year of caste. Then we've heard about Ayyapan Ayyankali for the for the Pulea so that is even lower caste than the year was and we've heard about the Christian missionaries and we've heard about the royalty and about the state of Charankov which was much more progressive as also Kochin but Malaba was of course in British hands at that time so the situation there was different. But the point was that all these people actually helped in bringing about a situation in which not only were people mobilizing against oppression because Kerala in the late 18th and the early 19th century was supposed to be what Vivekananda said was a mad I forget the exact term madhouse of you know because he saw so much of caste oppression there was not only social distancing even you cannot could not see people that there you could not people could not be seen by the upper caste it went to that extent so you had a very very oppressive caste system which was which was operating here of course the the matrilineal society in Kerala at that time was a little bit of a help to the to gender in the sense of making it easier for women to access property to be able to to be educated so the the fact that mass literacy and mass organizations could come together and could you know interact to bring about a sort of what should I say you know a demand for their rights and the state responding it was actually because of this I'm sorry when I talk about this I just get too excited was really because you know the while on the one hand education was reaching the upper caste the mission is I'm just going to emphasize that the most important points in this whole history the point that the missionaries actually were very helpful in in in bringing the the depressed caste into the education system that was a very critical role they played the the the the rulers at that time the I don't know whether anyone has heard about the 1817 royal edict which declared that education should be free and should be available to all in Kerala and that was actually a 15 year old woman ruler Gauri Parvati by who made that proclamation so all these actually combined together to the state and the people to bring about a sort of social mobilization which actually made governance very very participatory now at independence after the state became the region's combined together to begin Kerala state in 56 there was again another big campaign called the total literacy campaign because even with all the state help and the missionaries and this is another point I have to make that even with all that was happening in the pre-independence period still literacy levels were not very high but they were much higher than what was happening in the rest of India it was only after independence the state was combined and then you had a situation where in fact you had the women actually the figures you find now 90% literacy actually had become increased very rapidly over the over the years in the post independence period so you have now a situation where almost 90% of you and in the total literacy campaign each district in Kerala was declared as in that it was about 80s I think it happened in the 1980s so this has led to a situation as I said of very participatory governance and so people come forward to do things in a government also responds you know very fast to people's requirements so when the pandemic came and what he was talking about the floods when the pandemic come and come came that the already the the government had gone into action you know the whole government machinery had started acting of the departments had started thinking about what is happening in each sector and the including the planning board also was involved in all this initial planning and we had of course the fact that in this whole fight against the pandemic and the planning going on there were these frontline workers who were actually mostly women now the the the the frontline workers that I'm talking about were the health workers which are primarily besides the doctors and upon the specialists there were these health workers primarily women the nurses I'm giving you figures now the nurses numbering over 8,000 there were junior public health nurses more than 5,000 there were Asha workers there were Anganwadi workers and 66,000 there were the Kurumbashree workers which Shardham will talk about then there are new volunteer the sanitation workers the new volunteer force the voluntary force the voluntary brigade that has been created called Sanatan it is a new portal that has been created to which already there are about 3.25 lakh young volunteers of which about 75,000 are women and then of course there are the 120 local bodies the 1,200 local bodies and its members 52% more than 52% are women in the grand panchayat block panchayat district panchayat municipalities corporations and there are 22,000 wards so you can see the type of mobilization that occurred to fight the pandemic and this was each ward actually has a lot of people who can actually volunteer to the frontline health work and what was this frontline health work so critical to Kerala's containment of the pandemic it was a home quarantine for me that was the backbone of the of the whole containment process because this very effective quarantine that was put in place in the beginning really not only reduce the pressure on the hospitals it also prevented social spread of the pandemic so I'll stop here with this mobilization there and the very important role played by the home quarantine and all this was possible because of this the what should I say the culture of mobilization now I come now to the impact on women so this I was just contextualizing because everybody asked you know how come people just walked into the you know not this time at the flood time and the collections were going on yeah people just walking into offices where collection was taking place to help in the whole process of meeting the flood problems now of course that was not possible but through the whole volunteer work they were you know given training on different types of things the people were all there to do the to help out in this whole thing now what was the impact on women as was talked of earlier you all know that it impacts differently on men and women and more adversely on women and because of the this was the construction of gender the inequality which exists makes them more vulnerable in terms of its impact but and this is what I want to emphasize their resilience is unparalleled and what is that that is also part of their own internalization of their role because of their strong desire to sustain their households the vibrancy and keenness with which women want to bring their households and families back to normal which is critical to pose disaster to cover now the this is very important to remember about women that they were they are there we give us jobs we want to get back to work and we want to get our households going again now what was the losses in what the impact on women it was first of all immediately the loss of livelihoods because everything was almost shut down so accepting for the frontline workers and the essential services there was hardly any production any activity taking place so if you look at the industrial distribution of women workers you will find that they would have lost jobs just like men across sectors such as manufacturing construction trade and repair of motor vehicles hotels restaurants household services including domestic workers and tourism now however the problem with women workers is that they are overrepresented in the lower segments of the informal employment so that as temporary or part-time workers contract workers unregistered or undeclared workers and industrial outworkers that is employment without secure contracts worker benefits or social protection so what happens is that they are the ones who drop first and with no hopes of probably being re-employed so you know if you look at our employment data you'll be very surprised to know that in such a literate state 16.4% only of the women are recorded as workers in the 2017-18 which is the latest data that we had now if we want to estimate losses to worker to women workers in the pandemic this poses a serious problem because almost as many workers or as many percentage of workers are being underestimated studies have shown that if you actually count the work of women which they are doing in the nsso you have a category in the plf is you have a category which says primary occupation is household duties but engaged in some specified activities which are economic in nature if you add that to the workforce participation rates of women it almost doubles for every state so in such a situation to estimate losses of women by taking those categories or those activity statuses like self-employed or like casual workers who are most likely to have lost with the losers in this pandemic it is difficult to do so and i didn't do so in a study that we did in the planning board i didn't do the total losses of women because you are understating the total losses because you're not actually estimating the total women workers but in those categories where we have total workers like in narega we know the total workers so we did a calculation of the person who is lost how much is the average wage of narega there is 291 now in kerala it was 271 raised by 20 rupees by in the announcement by the central government so it's 291 if you multiply that you get about 177 crore loss in narega in ian kali in kerala people we have actually a similar scheme for the urban employment guarantee it's called the ian kali urban employment guarantee scheme there also there has been a loss of about 50 and odd crores then we have the kulumbashree micro enterprises where we have a total number so i'm just giving you the numbers where the totals are available what have been the nature of the losses and then what we did was we went and identified all those sectors of work where women would be employed in an informal manner that is domestic workers the most prominent category then shops and sales girls another very prominent category then petty trade and in these we tried to see what an average woman would be getting by talking to the talking through telephone of course with the questionnaire to the unions associations or organizations linked to these types of workers and we got per worker what would the loss be so it ranged from about 200 per day for a bamboo reed making person to about 300 to 291 to narega then it went on to about 300 to 400 rupees for sales girls and petty trade to about 450 for the domestic workers and the beauty parlors a little better paid than the fish vendors that was 300 rupees so then we did the calculation per day wage of these workers into the 25 days that calculation was done for the first lockdown period into 25 days of work how much would that be now this was one type of loss which we knew had been made by the by the the women the second was and this i think is very important pandemic has really intensified women's work now those who are frontline workers or in essential services would still be working but now what has happened is you have the children at home the Anganwadi onwards all the educational institutions are closed so you have the children at home if your husband is also unfortunately lost his job he's also at home so a woman at home you know sorry demands when you're at home so there is a terrific intensification of work for women that is something which has happened during this pandemic and we and this is where i think the government has to in my opinion there have been a response but here of course we have to be a little more careful and respond a little more to the requirements of the frontline women workers who are actually who are still working and who are not sitting at home like many of the other workers the third and much talked of impact is the violence has it increased violence against women now that of course reading all the international literature that is appearing there seems to be a terrific growth in violence but you know people looking at our own figures there is a study already done by a killer by Kerala Institute of local administration and what they find is of course reporting is less but that everybody is agreeing that reporting is less because women are not able to go out so that cannot be taken as an indicator of less violence because now women are not able to go out of their homes police records show a sharp decline if you look at march 2019 domestic violence and you look at march 20 domestic april or march 20 domestic violence or april for the same distinct you find a very sharp reduction in in rape rape very sharp reduction in domestic violence now these are of course figures we cannot trust completely because you know we don't know whether it's because women are not able to report all that but the women child development department has prepared a whatsapp where it's a number which the women can easily contact and in this what they find is that there has been about 90 cases reported in a span of two to three weeks and which means about at least five cases and now of which half are domestic violence cases so there has been domestic violence not that there has not been but it does not seem to be as you know as aggressive as one reads about when one's reading some of the literature that's appearing for other countries and for other states in India and another interesting thing is that some of these when you talk to some of the the local level what should i say the local level workers in the of the women and child development the local level officials they tell us that some houses the situation is changing also that you know there is more harmony in some households so there's positive things are happening on the other side so this is something which i cannot say at the moment whether the violence has increased but certainly it has not increased to a level which is at the moment unmanageable now this has been the impact which have happened on women the loss of livelihoods intensification of work and the violence now the and in this violence thing of course i'll probably end with that because that's a very interesting interesting statement which was made by the chief minister now because intensification means more household work also that you have to do now what has been the government's response now there has been the government response there's been in Kerala it's always been like that that you put try to put money into people's hands you don't try to put money into the banks that they give loans and all that you know that comes a little later but you try to put money into people's hands it provides them with food and the basic essentials so that they are able to to make up the to meet the essentials of of life now Kerala was the first government to announce a 20,000 crore release package which had two very uh it's almost two percent of the state domestic product unlike the central government package the first package which was less than a percent of the gross national product now and this package contains women's specific programs which of course one was very much to do with and the other of course was the and uh this was of course uh the the women friendly programs and the other thing which the government did to meet the needs of the vulnerable people that is the older people the disabled the widows the single women was to front load pensions for two months that was another very big program which was undertaken as part of this 20,000 crore package so that you have you have almost 46.85 lakh pensioners in the state up to October 2019 the largest number being old age 24.10 lakhs of which the larger number is women widows 13.36 lakhs unmarried women of age 50 plus 84,000 disabled 4.0 lakhs and agricultural laborers so that was another thing which the government did now with certain sectors like construction manufacturing etc completely locked down the government through the package offered 2000 crore loans through Kurumbashi mission and then of course Anarega. Now Kurumbashi I don't think I need to say much more but there were very wonderful schemes that they have actually come up with during the time of the pandemic starting with the IEC about this whole break the chain campaign which they have been doing then of course the community kitchens that they are doing in convergence in the local governments so a whole lot of things which the Kurumbashi people are doing in response to the pandemic and of course the gender their gender related programs also and the another interesting thing which I found in that in the Kurumbashi package was food packets provided at check posts you see because now all the Dhabas have gone they go from the check post start with the people coming in or the one day is going out the vehicles going out people stopping for food the Kurumbashi is doing that also as one of their tasks under this package. Now the other thing of course in this package was that we have lots of women lakhs and lakhs of women in the traditional sectors where they earn a very pottery amount 350 maximum and for these women who are in the sectors like the traditional sectors of Kerala like Koir, Kashu, Handun and Khadi where women are working on a peace rate basis in which the production completely stopped. Now here the government declared it's a small packet it's about on average 1000 rupees per person who's working in these sectors and even if they're not registered with these because there might be lots of women who are not registered with the welfare boards I must mention that all these sectors have welfare boards which are through which the help is being provided to these women and those who are not part of the welfare board also the government has announced that they would be giving them the same amount. Now then a very innovative program of the Women and Child Development Department I have to mention this it was almost much before the actually the era declared the lockdown it was a day after the schools and Anganwadi's everything was closed that this is the food to the Anganwadi's you know the Anganwadi's are given the food at lunchtime they have a small snack at breakfast then you have lunch and you have a take-home rush. Now this Anganwadi's it was you know the food was delivered home to all these Anganwadi's and this was something which you know actually caught a lot of international attention also because it was absolutely fantastic. Anganwadi's there are about 33,000 Anganwadi's in Kerala and there are children about 3.6 lakh children who are attending Anganwadi's so all the food was being provided to them by these Anganwadi teachers they got some transportation help and the helpers as they are called the teachers and their helpers. Now then of course the department is also trying through innovative ways to entertain children when they are at home you know not proving to be a problem to the mothers who are also at home trying to do all the household work and look after the equipment in the house so there are a whole lot of short video programs that have been planned that are being shown then there is also special needs the children with special needs especially those who are intellectually disabled lots of programs are made for them and to make things better for them then Kudubishi I think Shahbhai will say all the things that they did but the interesting thing was that the this also led to some sort of a disaster resilience planning disaster resilience planning which of course started after the first flood but this led to a disaster resilience planning and Kerala as you know has been attentive to mainstream gender through gender budgeting as an integral part of the planning process with a much more expansive view on women and women's lives taking into account their invisibilized unpaid work in social reproduction so while one was a bit apprehensive that allocations to women may fall in the budget of 2019-20-2021 it has not it has actually increased because the focus that the government has given to Kudubishi to the narega women to the employment scheme so you find that in fact that the amounts going for women specific programs in the budget has actually gone up from about 14.6% in 2018-19 to about 18.4% now in 2019-20 so a safe lodging for women working women's hospitals free known means all these are part of this program so this shows the clear acknowledgement on the part of the government of the significant role women will play in the revival strategy now to counter violence against women and children this one time major step by the government was deterring the setting up there was a you know the the chief minister comes every evening almost and there's a relaying of the programs which have been you know which are being undertaken so this was the there was setting up a fast track and courts and protection of children from sex epoxo courts across the state to handle any crimes against women and children that was one to declare then to ensure women's safety in these unusual circumstances the women and child department department catered wcd call center on whatsapp to prevent these the violence to which any abuse of violence against women can be reported now they received about 51 percent of the calls they received between april 11 30th and were regarding domestic violence the calls that received half of them were regarding domestic violence so the lessons to be learned is that of course there is need for an effective lessons to be learned from the totality of how kerala handled the the situation though it was one was the need for an effective home quarantine that was one of the the backbones of the whole way they handled the handle the handle the the pandemic the the need for proper planning that i think is the lesson which kerala would want to the the need for proper planning in fact with respect to health management it was x anti-planning even before the the this had come to kerala the minister anticipated it and because there are people in china is since it was originated there there were lots of students in china and so they were already prepared in in kerala how do we manage the situation so that the x anti-planning in plan in preparing for this for this pandemic style was kerala has already started that and the kerala is the only state continuing with five-year planning and i think this has enabled kerala to come up with comprehensive production employment plans in agriculture related activities and in the industrial services sector for the post-covid period involving the coordination between a number of departments with growth in demand for health non-related products in this thing kerala has an advantage improved employment will be generated for women also