Coping with growing coronavirus onslaught

With fewer than 1,200 cases and 30 deaths reported nationwide, India still figures low in the global coronavirus chart but preparations to face the worst onslaught, likely during April-May, are proving strenuous.

The World Health Oganisation praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for placing the entire nation of 1.3 billion people under lockdown a week ago.

There were critics at home who wondered if the Central order, imposing a 21-day lockdown, was at all necessary as 30 0f the 36 states and union territories had already declared lockdowns on their own.  Those who were yet to act were remote states of the northeast with small populations.

However, there was immediate political consolidation behind Modi. The Congress, the largest opposition party, pledged full support to the government in the fight against the virus.

The Central government announced the lockdown invoking the Disaster Management Act (DMA) of 2005, not the Contagious Diseases Act (CDA), which dates back to the colonial period.

Neither law envisages a nationwide lockdown. The CDA has provisions to place necessary restrictions in affected areas when infectious diseases break out. The DMA has provisions to impose curbs in affected areas when a natural disaster occurs.

However, no one is raising the issue of legality of the step. After all, an extraordinary situation calls for extraordinary steps.

Even if someone is inclined to test the legality of the government action, he may have to wait for better days as the Supreme Court is on a coronavirus break with a vacation bench attending to emergency maters through a videoconferencing facility.

The DMA has created a National Disaster Management Authority, with the Prime Minister as Chairman, a State Disaster Management Authority with the Chief Minister as Chairman in each state and a District Disaster Management Authority with the Collector as Chairman in each district.

These Authorities have responsibility for laying down policies, plans and guidelines for disaster management and for ensuring timely and effective disaster management. These bodies have not been activated to deal with the virus treat.

The DMA has also created a Disaster Management Response Force (DMRF) for the purpose of specialist response to a disaster or a threatening disaster situation.  There are 12 DMRF battalions, each consisting of 1,149 personnel, located at different places in the country.

It is a police force and lacks the expertise to deal with a disaster of this kind. It has not been pressed into service. It appears the DMA was invoked because it offers the widest scope for the Centre to exercise total control over the handling of the issue.

The Centre apparently failed to give adequate forethought to the impact of a nationwide lockdown and take steps to mitigate the hardship it would cause to the poor and other vulnerable sections of the population.

With no work to earn their daily bread and no transport to go back to their homes, in view of cancellation of train and bus services, tens of thousands of migrant workers in several states started trekking to their villages hundreds of kilometres away.

A 39-year-old man, trekking from Delhi to his Madhya Pradesh village, 300 kilometres away, collapsed and died on the highway after covering two-thirds of the distance in three days.

According to official reports, at least 27 trekkers died of exhaustion. Having invoked DMA, the Centre could have used the services of DMRF to facilitate quick transfer of the migrant workers to their home states before cancelling train and bus services.  

The authorities woke up to the humanitarian crisis too late. To make things worse, there was confusion in the responses of the governments. The Central government asked states to “contain” the migrants, and permitted use of NDRF funds to shelter and feed them.

The Chief Ministers of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which account for the largest number of migrant workers, adopted contradictory approaches.

Bihar’s Nitish Kumar asked that people from his state be prevented from returning.  UP’s Adityanath sent 1,000 buses to Delhi to pick up an estimated 100,000 people from his state stranded there.

Kerala, which has about 2.5 million of its people working in the Gulf States, hosts an equal number of workers from other states of India. It came up with a scheme to feed the migrant labour. However, the weekend saw restive workers assembling in a town demanding that they be sent home. Can they be faulted for seeking the security of home at a time of distress?

The Health Ministry said on Monday that limited community transmission of the COVID-19 disease has begun. It means India is just entering the worst phase