It looks like Govt of Maharashtra and Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) did not report correctly on number of Covid 19 cases and deaths related with it. So in addition to 83 deaths reported yesterday in Maharashtra, an additional 1328 deaths were added to the tally taking the state’s death toll to 5537. This clarification from Govt and BMC came after former CM Devendra Fadnavis commented that the figures given by both the bodies seem to be incorrect. So yesterday it was clarified that 862 deaths in Mumbai and 466 deaths in rest of Maharashtra had occurred earlier due to Covid and were not accounted for. Now the state’s death toll is 5537, which includes 3157 from Mumbai , which means only Mumbai accounts for 57% deaths in Maharashtra. My point here is that whether this mistake was genuine or deliberately both state dept and BMC purposely had hidden these figures to show the tally at lower end.
There is one more news item, which is a cause of greater worry now is that as per reports, in this month Mumbai city’s slum are seeing dip in Covid cases but there have been appreciable rise in residential buildings, and it has been reported that this is mainly due to lifting of some of the lockdown restrictions, as there have been spike in number of cases in Housing societies. Initially in Mumbai, cases had appeared mainly in residential buildings comprising people who had travelled abroad or had come in close contact with travellers. Within few weeks, the cases in slum area started to rise. However with easing of restrictions social distancing norms are not being followed strictly and hence cases are rising in residential buildings, where as maintaining social distancing in slums was always a problem earlier also. In some of the areas where earlier ratio was 70:30 ( Slum: Residential Buildings), now it has reached at 50:50 level, this only means that people who are staying in residential buildings have started to relax about the lockdown restrictions, and this phenomenon is not a good sign.
From this Monday (15th June), Maharashtra govt agreed to start partial local train services for essential services staff after more than 82 days. But there have been great confusion about who can use these services, as per govt only essential people working in govt offices are allowed to board local trains, whereas so many other people who are part of essential services like banking, IT companies etc are not allowed. All these people are saying that when they were part of essential services from the period of Lockdown 1, then why there is discrimination. Their view point is also right, as essential service is essential service whether it is govt sector or private sector, and govt should not be partial to the people serving in govt essential services. There have been chaos for last 2 days at all the local station where Railway Protection Force (RPF) guards are not allowing people from any other services except govt one to enter local stations. As you all are aware that in Mumbai local trains are always the fastest mode of transport and most of the people who travel to their work place always prefer them. There have been long queues at most of the stations because every passenger is being checked for temperature and ID card to maintain the protocol. However most of the travellers do not mind waiting in long queues because local trains are always better any other mode of road transport.
Now this is where this govt has failed as they never think about the problems which people are going to face, knowing that once trains are started there will be heavy rush for entering the stations, it would have been simple if they have staggered the time of people of different departments. Now govt is saying that govt will soon issue QR based e passes to employees working for essential services, which will also bear colour coding to enable swift ticket checking at entrance.
Now in the end, I can only say let the better sense prevail for the policy makers who are sitting in their cushy offices in Mantralaya ( Maharashtra govt’s head quarter)
Friends, what you say!!!!
Waiting for your comments/views/feed backs.
Anil Malik
Mumbai, India
17th June 2020
R. N. Mungale.
I agree “Let the better sense prevail in policymakers “.