It’s 2 more weeks of lockdown

new delhi — The world’s biggest coronavirus lockdown will be extended for two weeks beyond May 4, the government said on Friday but with some easing of restrictions.

The lockdown imposed near the end of March has caused misery for millions of workers in India’s vast informal sector and dealt a major blow to Asia’s third-biggest economy. The home ministry said that in view of “significant gains in the Covid-19 situation”, areas with few or no cases would see “considerable relaxations”.

Air travel and passenger trains ground to a halt because of the lockdown and only the transport of “essential goods” was allowed, causing major problems as well as considerable confusion for industry and agriculture. In particular hundreds of thousands of migrant labourers were left jobless overnight, prompting a huge exodus of people back to their home villages, many on foot, and leaving many dependent on handouts.

However the stringent restrictions have been credited with keeping confirmed cases of coronavirus to about 35,000 cases as of Friday, with 1,152 deaths.

Colour codes

Restrictions are being lifted largely according to what colour an area has been assigned in a government rating system.

India is split into red zones with “significant risk of spread of the infection”; green zones with zero cases or no confirmed cases in the past 21 days; and those in between as orange. This reflects a high concentration of cases in many urban areas such as New Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Ahmedabad but very few or none in many rural areas of the country.

Red and orange zones will continue to have intensified contact tracing, house-to-house surveillance, and no movement in or out except for medical emergencies and the supply of essential goods and services, the home ministry said. —

PTI, ANI LOCKDOWN, A LONG ROAD OF HARDSHIP FOR THEM: (Clockwise from top left) Stranded migrants wait to board buses to return to their native place in Surat; migrants with their belongings arrive at the district collector’s office in Bengaluru; workers from various northern states rest near closed shops in Thane along the Mumbai-Nashik highway enroute their journey to their native places; people who arrived from Madhya Pradesh being offered bananas before boarding a bus to take them back to their native place in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh; Andhra Pradesh fishermen who were stranded at Gujarat reach their state border’s Krishna district on Friday. —