THURSDAY, APRIL 25, 2024
Sujay Gupta
There comes a time when we heed a certain call,
When the world must come together as one,
There are people dying, and its time to lend a hand to life,
The greatest gift of all…..
These are the first lines of the opening stanzas of the iconic “We are the World” song sang by a galaxy of the most famous names in the world of music, who together to raise funds for the famine in Africa.
In the 1980s famine in South Africa was a distant blob in another planet. The COVID pandemic has brought the reality of shared grief and brutal assaults on our sanity and health.
We have seen enough, read enough and felt enough. This piece of writing is not intended to repeat the obvious. This isn’t about adding yet another chapter to the increasingly thickening worldwide journal of the assault on humanity. It’s about shards of hope. Of people fending for themselves and each other. About a soul uplifting movement in Aldona to be self-sufficient by raising funds for oxygen, ambulance rides, food for those at home and every kind of support that civilized societies expect from a system that they pay for. It’s about a group working tirelessly to put house helps and other staff back to work, if they have been paid off. It about touching those touchpoints that matter. About people’s lives and well being. It’s about a stranger driving to your grandfather’s home with an oxygen cylinder because you aren’t there purely on the basis of a Whatsapp message calling for help. Let us now break down the script of mismanagement into fragments
The reluctance to even utter the word lockdown
Why has 2021 come back to hit us with a force multiple times greater than 2020? This is being written after some boxes have been reluctantly ticked. A lockdown has been announced without uttering the term “lockdown" the Chief Minister calling it a “Statewide curfew instead”. Is this a sign of genuflection at the altar of the BJP High Command that come what may, Goa will not have a lockdown in the month of May? But this is akin to securing the stables after the horses have bolted. The government claims that there are enough oxygen cylinders but patients still have to wait for hours or days to get the one. The government says there are enough beds but if you or your loved ones fall ill, you really are living on a prayer.
Where is the data? Can you manage a disaster without knowing the scale of your problem?
With the situation going out of hand, sources in the government have informed that a bed availability dashboard has been created but the Goan government is actually reluctant to make it available to all. That’s because transparency is not a friend of governance, at least the one under focus now. Its easier to state that there are no beds available than allowing people to know the exact number of beds available at each institution. If information is available online the gap between dialogue and delivery, between promises and their fulfilment is glaringly visible. And that doesn’t work.
Is real-time data available on the demand and supply of oxygen in the context of the caseload of critical patients? The government is thanking corporates and mining majors for their CSR initiative of providing oxygen concentrators. But does it ask itself why it has to come to this? The state of Goa, like Kerala, could have foreseen the second wave and commissioned multiple but small scale oxygen plants in hospitals and other places.
The mystery of not making COVID negative certificated mandatory
The “visitors” from Delhi, Bombay and elsewhere for whom Goa is the great escape, with no regulations are thrilled with Chief Minister Sawant. So are the film units who have, again mysteriously got permissions to conduct film shootings even as Goans are huddled indoors trying to protect themselves. This writer knows of at least one filmmaker who came here for a shoot and tested positive and had to be admitted to a hospital. But for five-star hotels to government-run institutions, all have turned into shooting venues.
The Fatorda MLA Vijai Sardesai, this week had to “raid” a shooting unit of Marathi production at Ravindra Bhavan Margao The crew apparently had secured permissions from the Ravindra Bhavan management but not the Entertainment Society of Goa the nodal agency. When Sardesai reached the spot he found no one wearing masks or maintaining any distancing. Surely maintain COVID protocols must have been one of the conditions for the grant of the permission, however dubious it may have been. Hence, if these units from outside the state become super spreaders, albeit unknowingly, the government is totally accountable for this double whammy of callousness a) Not insisting on a COVID negative certification and then either allowing shootings or ignoring permissions are given by breaching laws.
The High Court steps into governance, because the executive fails to
What has perhaps got missed in the COVID milieu is that civic society which included professionals in Goa did not wait and hope for the government to do its job. Groups of advocates and civic society filed multiple petitions for directions to the Government to take actions which would simply give the people of Goa a better chance to survive. Yet it came to that. And a snapshot of that High Court’s order is literally a charge sheet of malfunctioning. Here is what the court said
a) Directed the State Govt. to provide sufficient police protection around Hospitals and wards and boards and posters are put up informing the public at large that there will be zero-tolerance towards any form of violence against medical personnel and that it will be dealt with an iron hand;
b) Asked the Central Government to place on record if any patient admission policy has been formulated as per the direction of the Supreme Court;
c) Directed the state govt to give details, in an affidavit in respect of purchase of 200 ventilators which the State Govt. had assured to purchase in an affidavit filed before the High Court in March 2020;
d) Directed the state government to indicate the status of the Vaccination drive in respect of age group of 18 to 45;
e) Directed the State Government to indicate, in affidavit whether any thought process has gone in respect of a lockdown considering that the situation is out of control;
f) State government directed to file affidavit in respect of the testing facilities in the state;
g) State government directed to file affidavit in respect of essential medicines available in the State of Goa and steps taken to augment the same that we have patients succumbing for want of medicines;
h) State of Goa directed to make the COVID tests results available at the earliest;
i) Directed the state government to insist on negativity certificate issued 72 hrs prior from those entering Goa from the 10th of May 2021.
j) Directed the state govt. to indicate in its affidavit whether facility for buffer stock of oxygen is in place as directed by the Hon’ble Supreme Court;
If these directives are not an indication of a total collapse of governance of pandemic management, then what is?
And yet after the order, the government actually contemplated going to the Supreme Court against the High Court order. But better sense may have prevailed. Then there were murmurings in the corridors of governance that it would be “practically not possible”: to ask for everyone entering the state to prove that they were COVID free. Yet again, the demand was only to check tourists and the work from home escapees from the metros who wanted to work from Goan rented homes.
But the Government was hell-bent on making life easier for these tourists. The Chief Minister, in his press conference on Friday said that even those with two jabs of the vaccine would be allowed in. This notwithstanding the fact that injections infections post vaccinations are not ruled out.
Truly circumstances beyond Pramod Sawant's control have forced him to have an equivalent of a lockdown, but the plethora of governance errors have left Goans, who too should take some of the blame by ignoring safety protocols when the situation was better, hurt, angry and very very worried.
Sujay Gupta is the Consulting Editor Herald Publications and tweets @sujaygupta0832
