APRIL 11, 2020
KARO-NA! Open The Lock
Last three weeks were the most testing weeks for everyone on this planet. For me these were like three years with no end in sight. My friends have similar feelings and everyone is exhausted sitting at home. Look at the irony, the head of states, health experts including WHO head and yes, my parents are telling me that the lockdown is good for all of us.
India is a country of 1.3 billion people, spread over the densely populated cities, towns, and villages. Around 60% of this population is living in rural areas and primarily dependent on agriculture. In times of this pandemic, the worst affected sufferers are migrant laborers who leave their homes to earn daily wages in big cities. With the entire economic activity on pause and uncertainty in terms of time, this lockdown is adversely affecting everyone and more particularly the vulnerable section of the society. Intellects around the world are discussing the idea of trade-off between saving lives and saving the economy. News reports are full of stories of economic recession and disastrous effects in future. We can go on debating the grim situation due to lockdown.
However, the question is - How do we unlock it?
In my article number 7, I had suggested creating a COVID city to park infected people and provide them a fully operational city. The objective was to prevent the spread of coronavirus to a large part of the population in every country and to provide an effective and efficacious way of dealing with the COVID-19 situation. In my view, this idea has lost relevance in terms of timing. Now we need COVID cities composed of infection free population to work as small islands. I have noticed that various areas are declared as containment zones to deal with highly infected situations, which I would call small COVID cities. After reading divergent opinions, I strongly support the idea of unlocking, else we will see a large number of deaths and civil unrest due to hunger and starvation.
Hence, I suggest this;
There are four sectors which require immediate unlocking - manufacturing, government offices, transportation, and agriculture. So far as factories and government offices are concerned, we can assume that these are owned/controlled by a responsible set of people. Owners/ heads of manufacturing facilities and government offices can identify key areas of work and infection free workers to undertake that work. These workers can be called in to work and ideally, they should stay in the designated area after work and they should not go back to their homes. Each factory shall be equipped with medical facilities and each worker should be monitored and tested on a regular basis.
Another area which requires immediate unlocking is the agricultural sector, as live crops are standing in farms. Also, there is significant dependence on this sector, therefore, locking it for a longer period will create massive distress. A large part of the farming land is located in the rural areas and state governments should split such areas by creating designated zones and people should not be allowed to move beyond these zones. Each zone will have quarantine areas where infected ones can be housed. The remaining part of the area and people living therein can be permitted to carry out agricultural activities. Civil administration of states including police is not equipped to control and regulate functioning of such zones and here we need intervention of defence forces. We have seen use of defence forces in times of insurgencies and combing operations in disturbed areas. We should use tactical experience and operational capabilities of defence forces in these times.
Transportation sector is the most difficult area to handle in a situation like one in hand. This is primarily due to - transportation being highly scattered and unorganized, large scale movement of trucks and other carriages across India, time spent on the road by drivers and support staff, requirement to mingle with a large size of population etc. Here, I would once again suggest involving the transportation system of defence forces, as they have massive experience of moving men and material across India and they have cantonments in each state. Each state government can ask their transportation operators to work in line with armed forces and transportation systems including fueling, repairing, toll crossing etc. used by the army should be used for end to end services provided by private operators.
In the current situation there cannot be a perfect and foolproof plan but the above given suggestions can be blown up by the experts and appropriate strategy can be created around it. My sixteen year old brain cries hoarse that this is the one way to unlock it.