There have been many violations of lockdown measures in West Bengal and the situation in some state districts is serious: Centre
New Delhi: As the dispute between Centre and TMC getting rough by the day, BJP leaders from the state attacked the West Bengal government by Union Minister Debasree Choudhury claiming harassment by the state government.
Amid pandemic, while governments around the globe are asking for collaboration to combat the novel coronavirus, in India, the centre and the West Bengal government are resentful, each blaming the other of wrongdoings.
The Mamata-led government has claimed that the Centre is selectively targeting the state, while on the other hand, the Central government accuses that WB has been non-transparent with publishing data associated to COVID-19 cases and testing of samples.
Testing, Tracing and Treating, Transparency are four pillars which sustain the struggle against the highly infectious pandemic.
The Inter-Ministerial Central Team (IMCT) sent by the Home Ministry to survey and report back on the COVID infrastructure in West Bengal, has reportedly said that they are not being permitted to “venture out of the guest house without the permission of the state police”.
The centre sent two IMCT teams to visit and report on how the lockdown is being implemented by the state. The teams were to visit certain “hotspots”, chosen by themselves, to take stock of the condition.
Mamata government claims that these teams were sent to Kolkata by a special Air India cargo flight without any consultation with the state.
On her part, CM too wrote a letter to PM Modi. “As an established procedure, it is expected that the central team should have first taken a briefing from the state government officials prior to going for the field visits,” she wrote, adding that the observations made by the Centre on West Bengal are deprived of facts.
We welcome all constructive support & suggestions, especially from the Central Govt in negating the #Covid19 crisis. However, the basis on which Centre is proposing to deploy IMCTs in select districts across India including few in WB under Disaster Mgmt Act 2005 is unclear.(1/2)
— Mamata Banerjee (@MamataOfficial) April 20, 2020
The Bharatiya Janata Party has also claimed that the TMC-led West Bengal government has been “fudging” COVID information.
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The dispute started when the West Bengal raised eyebrows by not publishing their daily medical bulletin for two consecutive days, on 2 and 3 April.
Which happened right after a press conference by a team of government doctors, who put the number of COVID-19 related deaths in Bengal, at that point, at 7.
Barely 2 hours after this press conference, the chief secretary retracted the numbers and put the number of deaths in the state back at 5.
The next bulletin, which was issued, had a different format from the previous ones.
The number of new cases and deaths reported every day was replaced with the “number of active cases” each day.
The trigger point was when the Director of the National Institute Of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (NICED), which is ICMR’s nodal body in Kolkata, said that they were receiving fewer samples for testing with each passing day. This was about 2 weeks into the lockdown when Bengal was testing just over 200 people a day.
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