COVID: CENTRE VERSUS STATE
In the end, it took a phone call from the prime minister’s office for Union minister D.V. Sadananda Gowda to self-quarantine for the mandated seven days for passengers flying into Karnataka from Delhi. Until then, Gowda had insisted he was exempt from rules that applied to ordinary citizens. Karnataka’s BJP government lent a helping hand, making an exception to quarantine requirements for Union ministers and even backdating the addendum to May 23, though it was circulated on the evening of May 25 (Gowda had arrived in Bengaluru earlier the same day). While telling social media that he would now self-quarantine, Gowda clarified that he was still “pained” by a controversy he believes was overblown. The state Congress party has described the addendum as an “afterthought”.
The rules, as they stood, required those who had tested negative for COVID-19 48 hours before arrival— through a test by an Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)-approved lab—to self-quarantine, rather than be held in institutional quarantine. State Congress president D.K. Shivakumar says that “everyone, including a Union minister, comes under the purview of the order”. Gowda’s defence that he is performing an essential service has cut little ice with a public that sees it as just another example of an Indian VVIP claiming the rules don’t apply to him.
Politics aside, the controversy Gowda finds himself in might be more attributable to confusing and frequently changing rules than VVIP entitlement. Countless guidelines have been issued
since the first phase of the nationwide lockdown just over two months ago. Now, in this latest phase, with the Centre trying to repair some of the damage done to the economy while at the same time claiming to have devolved responsibility to state governments, the confusions are only mounting. When the latest phase of the lockdown began on May 18, the guidance from the Centre appeared to imply that state authorities would have the freedom to finetune their lockdown restrictions and strategies based on their own reading of risk and best ways forward. At this stage, domestic and international air travel was suspended. On May 18, the Centre modified its guidelines to stop state governments making exemptions to lockdown restrictions apart from those granted by the Centre; it did, however, allow state governments the leeway to not apply exemptions and to apply existing restrictions more stringently, if they deemed it necessary. Just two days later, on May 20, the Centre said it would resume domestic air travel from May 25, despite the misgivings of many state authorities. According to Kerala health minister K.K. Shailaja, “the state government had told the minister of civil aviation that opening air traffic was not a good option”. Still, the Centre pressed ahead and many state governments responded by issuing quarantine rules, some for as long as 14 days, and caps on numbers of flights. Inevitably, confusion reigned on the first day that flights resumed, with hundreds of cancellations and marooned passengers, some of whom had sold assets to get the money to buy tickets home. Some 428 flights managed to transport 30,550 passengers to their destinations, but 630 flights were cancelled. Incidentally, despite the number of cancelled flights, hotels near the airport have not been allowed to open. “I have to go back to Bengaluru to start my new job,” says Payal Pruthi, who had travelled to Sonepat before the lockdown to visit her parents, “but I don’t know what to do when I see all these cancellations.” She says local taxi operators are profiteering, charging passengers Rs 7,000-8,000 to drop them off at the airport. The miscommunications and misunderstandings between central rules on air travel and state interpretations echoed the initial ban on interstate travel when the lockdown began on March 25. Faced with a mounting migrant crisis, states such as Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, among others, seemed able to violate guidelines to bring migrants home across state borders. While in other states, officials were sanctioned for not implementing lockdown orders strictly enough. Eventually, it became clear, despite the thousands on the streets, that state borders were to be sealed and migrants were to shelter in place. Then, on April 29, guidelines were issued to permit migrants to move between states with “mutual consent”. On May 1, the Railways received permission to run Shramik Specials to transport migrant labourers to their homes. After the Centre accused West Bengal, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand of being slow to grant consent to these trains, new guidelines, issued on May 19, appeared to suggest mutual consent was no longer necessary, that Shramik specials did not need permission to enter receiving states. Even as criticism rained down on the travel arrangements for labourers, including an unseemly dispute over who was paying for the train tickets, there was more confusion early in May about resuming select train services for paying passengers. First, on May 2, the Centre said there would be no passenger trains until May 17, before revising that decision on May 10 to announce 15 specific routes. But authorities in Karnataka and Goa responded by refusing to allow trains to arrive from states in which infection rates were high, such as Delhi, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Now, the Railways say passenger trains will run again from June 1, though state authorities have yet to announce they will accept trains arriving from Covid hotspots. As for the Shramik specials, official data says that between May 1 and May 25, the service has ferried some four million migrant workers to their home states on over 3,000 trains. The finer details are less impressive, with many trains having to take detours and delays running into days, reports of inadequate food and water, lack of social distancing and, more sombrely, people, even children, dying on trains. In just 48 hours, for instance, on May 26 and 27, nine people on their way to Bihar and Uttar Pradesh on Shramik specials were reported to have died; a 10th person died in a UP hospital. The Centre has said it is calling on states to tailor their responses to the pandemic, but it is clear that more coordination is needed, that the chopping and changing of guidelines is confusing for people trying to move between states, each with their own requirements. Governments, both at the Centre and in the states, are struggling to come to grips with reopening the country, after 65 days of lockdown, while infections continue to rise.
IT’S CLEAR THAT MORE COORDINATION IS NEEDED, THAT A JUMBLE OF RULES IS CONFUSING FOR THOSE TRYING TO MOVE BETWEEN STATES