Delhi can now define its own ‘red zones’
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Broadly, the Centre’s guidelines are in the right direction of opening up the economy and leaving it to states to work out the details.
nNEWDELHI: The Centre on Sunday allowed state governments to classify and demarcate their own red, orange and green zones --areas specified as per their vulnerability and presence of Covid-19 cases, a key demand of the Delhi government since the entire city was under the ‘red zone’.
Major relaxations that were announced by the Centre amid the nationwide lockdown were not applicable to the red zones, crippling Delhi’s efforts to jump start economic and business activity. The Union home ministry in its guidelines to states issued for the fourth version of the lockdown, which will stay in effect till May 31, has fixed broad rules for the states on which specific rules can be framed.
A red zone is an area where there are more than 10 Sars-cov-2
STATEMENT, issued by the Delhi government
positive cases. A red zones can have one or many containment zones to limit the spread of the cases. As on Sunday, Delhi had 73 containment zones.
On May 2, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal had first raised the demand for the Centre to reconsider the demarcation of ‘red zones’, which, until Sunday, was being done on the basis of districts, across the country. “All the 11 districts of Delhi are in the red zone as per the Centre’s rule, meaning that the reported Covid-19 cases in each district is 10 or more. Because of this parameter, Delhi, being such a small city, will never be able to get out of the red zone. No economic activity will be
able to restart because of this. This rule needs to change and should either be on the basis of containment zones or wards,” Kejriwal had said on May 2.
On Sunday, the Centre gave states and Union Territories a free hand to designate areas into red, green and orange zones. “With red and orange zones, containment zones and buffer zones will be demarcated by the district authorities, after taking into consideration the guidelines issued by the minister of health and family welfare (MOHFW),” the order stated.
“States may categorise districts/municipal corporations as red/orange/green zones. States may, however, also choose to categorise a sub-division/ward or any other appropriate administrative unit as red/orange/green zone after detailed analysis at their end, duly taking into consideration the geographical spread of cases, contacts and the zone of influence terms of disease spread,” read a letter written by Preeti Sudan, secretary, MOFW.
The Delhi government, responding to the guidelines, said, “Broadly, the Centre’s guidelines are in the right direction of opening up the economy and leaving it to states to work out the details. We have always been saying that we all will now have to learn to live with corona. We used the last two-month lockdown period to prepare ourselves for dealing with corona by improving necessary logistics and health infra. We do expect a slight increase in cases when the economy reopens and Delhi is prepared to deal with it.”