Oppn slams Centre’s ad hoc lockdown

The Opposition on Sunday launched a multi-pronged attack on the Centre during a discussion on Coronavirus pandemic in Lok Sabha, blaming it for unilaterally imposing the lockdown without giving any time for guest workers to return to their native places, thus forcing them to walk hundreds of kilometres to their destinations, leading to deaths of many of them.

Replying to the discussion, health minister Harsh Vardhan said that the Prime Minister should be thanked for announcing the 'janata curfew' which gave time to gauge the preparedness to fight the pandemic and then the lockdown was imposed.

Initiating the debate, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said that the government had neither managed to flatten the curve nor improve the plunging economy. He said that many countries had managed to control the pandemic without letting it affect their eonomy.

India seems to have managed to flatten the wrong curve, he said. India had become the poster child of the worst case scenario.

Tharoor said there was “utter mismanagement” in dealing with the pandemic. The country has witnessed a “fundamental breakdown” in government machinery in the past few months, instead of mature and proactive governance. He said that instead of clearly-communicated protocol and comprehensive strategies, the country witnessed a lack of clarity, readiness and preparedness. The ruling dispensation continued to delay the implementation of a national strategy to stop the spread of the virus. The failure to adequately recognise the scale and complexity of the problem compounded their unwillingness to listen to the voices that warned well in advance of the consequences of ignoring the problem of such magnitude, Tharoor said.

Describing the hardships faced by the common people and the migrants, Shiv Sena MP Arvind Sawant said, “After the announcement of lockdown, Mumbai streets saw more people than the number of people who would have come to streets postPartition. But the government did not start trains. People were mowed down by (goods) trains on railway tracks. Somewhere, we made mistakes.”

The health minister said the ministry had received `893.93 crore from the PMCares Fund for 50,000 Made in India ventilators. The Centre brought back over 12 lakh Indians stranded abroad and arranged trains for 64 lakh guest workers.