The Home Ministry released 11,092 Crores under the State Disaster Risk Management Fund as a response to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

But as people have pointed out, the allocations seem absurd. KL, one of the worst affected states, got a mere 157 Crores. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/centre-releases-11092-crore-under-sdrmf/article31251774.ece

KL, which has the second highest number of confirmed cases, got less than 0.1x of what MH got. MH ranks as the state with the highest number of cases.

MH's allocation, as the news article notes, is 1611 Crores.

The Union Home Ministry has said it's releasing this fund treating COVID-19 as a "notified disaster" so that it can release the SDRF funds.

And has pointed to 15th FC Recommendations as the rationale for these allocations. What did the report say?

Here's the actual allocation ratios and split between central and state contributions per state, apropos SDRF, according to the 15th FC Report.

Let's look at how they arrived these ratios and allocations for each state. Because this is exasperating.

Previous FCs took the actual expenditure incurred by each state in arriving at this allocation. The15th FC has added the parameters of Area, Population and Risk.

Here's the full SDRMF allocations for 2020-21, according to the 15th Finance Commission's Report.

Get the chart here: http://www.datawrapper.de/_/PO1bZ/ 

Now, you can see that MH is oddly the top gainer in this allocation. Even more than UP.

And KL is actually getting less than some states smaller than itself. Punjab, Haryana, Chhattisgarh among others are smaller than KL but get more money. Wonder why?

The reason MH is in the pole position is because the 15th FC made an arbitrary choice to make it the reference state.

Read these two sections of the methodology of calculating the allocations for SDRF carefully.

So, the state of MH which is a very large state and has a large population got these two factors added as part of this methodology.

Further, there's a Disaster Risk Index parameter added which also makes MH's advantages accrue even further.

The way the Disaster Risk score is calculated is another strange and arbitrary method. It's end tabulation looks thus.

So, they add this DRI to the other other factors of Area, Population and previous expenditure. And arrive at that ratio.

The total SDRMF allocation was 28,983 Crores. Of which the centre has now released 11,092 crores. Which it has done so in the same ratio.

This is on top of the fact that the centre hasn't even released what it owes the states in GST dues.

And there's also a shortfall in the 42% share of the divisible pool sharing that the centre is supposed to share with the states.

That is, there's a skew against southern states and KL in particular in the 15th FC's overall allocation. That allocation is more sharply skewed against KL when it comes to SDRF.

On top of that, the centre isn't even releasing the monies that were unjust allocations in the first place!

If you and I failed to pay taxes to the centre, we'd have got a million notices. Now the centre hasn't paid its dues to the states. Who will bell this cat?