THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Although Kerala has come out tops in overall good governance for the third consecutive year according to the latest Public Affairs Index (PAI) released by the Public Affairs Centre (PAC), in two crucial areas - ‘Transparency and accountability’ and ‘Delivery of justice’ - the state has slipped badly.
Kerala has crashed from the third position to eleventh in ‘Transparency and accountability’ and from the second to sixth in ‘Delivery of justice,’ show comparisons with PAI 2017. When PAC first ranked the states in 2016, Kerala had stood first in both categories. PAC, a think-tank devoted to governance issues, released its PAI 2018 in Bengaluru on Saturday.
While Kerala has made huge strides in several other sectors this year to bag the top position, in ‘Social protection’ too the state has slipped from the first position in 2017 to fifth in 2018 among the big states (states with a population over two crores).
For calculating the ‘Delivery of Justice’ ranking, the think-tank had taken into account criteria such as pendency of cases in the High Court and District Courts and the number of under-trials. For ‘Transparency and accountability,’ the criteria included the status of the State Information Commission and the Lok Ayukta, number of services provided under the state’s e-governance plan, social audits under the NREGA, panchayat devolution and the criminal records of MLAs.
‘’We have followed public data alone for ranking the states,” PAC senior fellow C K Mathew said over the phone from Bengaluru. “A higher or a lower rank is the result of a combination of factors. Other states may have done well in a particular year in a particular sector while one state may have remained static. In this case, Kerala may not have worked that hard in a given sector.’’ For ranking states in social protection, the criteria included allocation and off-take of food grain under PDS, the incidence of crime against SC/ST communities, unemployment rate and the number of state government employees.
On the bright side, Kerala’s top rank in good governance resulted from the significant gains it made in categories like economic freedom, financial management, environment and essential infrastructure. In sectors like crime, law and order; women and children; and support for human development, it maintained the top position.