Hyderabad: Telangana’s beloved Chief Minister KCR seems to have abandoned his beloved Telangana to be ravished by the deadly Carona Virus.
Covid-19 pandemic has spread dangerously across the state within the last few weeks and the government seems to have given up watching helplessly, while it had the virus under control initially giving hope to the people of the state that KCR government is alert to the responsibility it owes to the peopled who elected it.
Life or livelihood
Caught between the dilemma of life and livelihood, the government seems to have opted for livelihood throwing all caution to the wind resulting in a record 985 test-positive cases reported in just one day, Friday, June 26th.
New papers, TV Channels, web portals, social media are reporting an alarming increase in the number of COVID-19 positive cases. According to reports, an estimated more than 10,000 positive cases have been reported and more than 50% come from the GHMC compass. And equally, alarming are reports from NGOs in the city about the growing acute shortage of beds in hospitals. Several instances of Covid-19 patients being refused beds in city hospitals, government, and corporate have been reported over the social media due to which several patients mostly senior citizens have suffered deaths.
Surge in positive cases
Media reports have outlined the surge in positive cases as a regular feature for the past ten days., even as the state government seems to be more interested in launching the Haritha Haram program with a fanfare that stands out grotesquely in a situation calling for the extra emergency measure to stop the pandemic from further devastating lives and homes in the state.
Gardens and parks are not a priority at this time of point when more and more Covid-19 testing facilities and beds for victims of the pandemic are needed. The inauguration of ther 50.08 hectares urban forest park,’Tangedu Vanam” in lakdaram reserve forest in a cost IRS 3.45 crores on Thursday and the opening of another park in the city built at a cost IRS 20 Lakhs by K.T. Rama Rao, Urban Development Minister appears to be totally out of place.
Trading, Merchant community shown awareness
The city’s trading and merchant community have shown more awareness of the dangerously high numbers of positive testing patients and have taken wise, bold, and timely decisions of voluntarily pulling shutters not minding the financial losses till July 8th.
The pandemic sweeping across the globe with various stages of severity is not for the first-timer. The world has been through this crisis earlier also and to quote the French Nobel laureate Albert Camus “ everybody knows pestilence have a way of recurring in the world yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.’
New Delhi and states have traditionally been in a state of denial for quite some time not daring to reveal the exact extent of the havoc the pandemic caused, but hiding and biding time blaming the Tableegi for being super-spreaders of the virus, like the ancient Romans, did blame the Christians for the outbreak of Antonine plague. And amazingly our Prime Minister Modi, of course unbeknownst like ancient Romans struck by the plague turned to magic assuming that spells written on their door frames would turn away the plague, appearing on national television appealed to the nation to bang pots and pans and a week later with another laughable plea to switch off electrical bulbs and light oil lamps to ward away the virus.
But neither the state nor the BJP government at the center seems to have learned anything from this life-threatening crisis that has severely dented the country’s economy and demoralized its people exposing the deep political social and religious chinks in Indian polity.
Crisis and calamities are breeding grounds for learning from those who have successfully come out of the chaos. The Telangana government should take a leaf in fact the entire country from Kerala. Kerala’s remarkable reaction in bringing to control the epidemic.
Go alone policy should be dropped
The government has to change its go alone policy and rope in NGOs and other social organizations and individuals who are now on the ground and take them into confidence working with them putting to positive use the feedback these NGOs haver on the situation prevailing in the city.