Portal: 200k volunteers, 400k workers drafted to fight Covid in rural areas

NEW DELHI: A portal set up in June to track how Covid-19 is being managed in the rural areas now shows that 400,000 frontline workers and 200,000 volunteers have been drafted to fight the pandemic at the grassroots level.

Called the Covid-19 dashboard and managed by the Panchayati Raj ministry, the portal has data of the over 250,000 panchayats that India has and shows that 45% of them have set up health and sanitation committees.

The dashboard was set up after the second wave of the pandemic with the idea to prevent another devastating wave from wreaking havoc.

“Different states have adopted different strategies to manage Covid. Even within the state, districts have taken different approaches. Similarly, at the panchayat level, some have focused on handwashing campaigns, others may have resorted to creating Whatsapp groups or wall paintings to make people aware about social distancing,” said a senior official of the Panchayati Raj ministry, on condition of anonymity.

Another senior official of the ministry said the dashboard helps track Covid-related activities in every panchayat. “Such granular data was not available last year. This helps us to be prepared and step up efforts where needed,” he said.

To be sure, the government has panchayat-level data for several other programmes under rural development. During the last five years, it even started the satellite mapping of rural assets and public programmes.

The dashboard also shows that over 86,000 panchayats have conducted Covid-awareness campaigns while 84,000 have updated community preparedness checklists.

It also shows that 57,000 panchayats have been able to identify high-risk populations in their areas, and more than 1.5 lakh home isolation kits— basic medicines and thermometers—have been distributed in rural India.

But ministry officials say the penetration of Covid-related activities could be much deeper in the rural areas as states operate differently.

“After all, we can’t impose anything on the states as panchayat is a state subject. We are here only to help,” said the first official.

At present, the dashboard uploads data every fortnight. “But if the cases increase, we also have the provision to upload data in real-time,” said the second official.

On September 15, the country registered 30,570 new cases in the rural areas, mostly in the southern states with Kerala topping the list.