No harassment of visitors at entry points: Himachal CM

SHIMLA: Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur on Tuesday assured that the tourists coming to the state will not be put to any inconvenience at entry points of the state in the grab of Covid test reports.

“The RT-PCR negative test report for the tourists/visitors coming from the seven high load states is just a mechanism evolved to keep track of the persons coming from Covid hotspots and staying in hotels or elsewhere. Nobody will be denied entry to the state on this pretext,” he said at Dharamshala. Thakur reached Dharamshala in the morning to review the Covid situation in the Kangra, which is among four worst affected districts bordering Punjab.

There has been a total of 20 deaths in the past 36 to 40-hours in the state, six of these were from Kangra, apart from five each from Una and Mandi districts.

There have been 1700 fresh cases during the past two days, of which 619 were in the past 24-hours with Kangra testing 500 new cases during this period. The active cases in the state on Tuesday reached 6,269.

When asked by mediapersons about possibilities of a lockdown, the Chief Minister ruled out such a possibility asserting that the hotel industry has particularly suffered due to lockdown last year.

He said the state government has imposed certain conditions on the tourists visiting from seven states–Punjab, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, UP, Delhi and Rajasthan .

“We have taken care of the tourism industry to ensure it does not suffer. We have put in place a mechanism to monitor it accordingly at their places of stays. Tourists and other visitors will not be harassed by stopping for Corona reports on the state's borders because it causes a lot of inconvenience and difficulty to them,” he said.

Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur has asked the local health and administrative authorities to declare a place or locality as mini containment zone where over five Corona positive cases are reported.

Frequency of testing should be increased and people should be encouraged to vaccinate themselves. He urged the local bodies and NGOs to come forward and help the State Government to educate people in the fight against the resurgence of Coronavirus which is more potent and deadly than last year.