Reduced restrictions
The Jammu and Kashmir administration has announced a seven-hour relaxation in the restriction on non-essential movement amid concerns raised by traders over the 64-hour long weekend Covid lockdown hampering their businesses.
Notably, about a fortnight ago, the administration had imposed complete a restriction on non-essential movement from Fridays 2 pm to Mondays 6 am to rein in the surge in COVID-19 cases.
The move was necessary owing to the swift surge in covid-19 cases across Jammu and Kashmir with the twin cities of Jammu and Kashmir witnessing huge number of cases. Even though the numbers were underreported owing to the fact that many affluent households either went for private testing or at home testing using various available kits.
Since most of the home tests were not reported as people preferred to stay at home and remained in isolation till they got well. Same stands true even today as most of the positive cases are not reported and the number of positive cases that are reported still remain alarmingly high.
Ironically, the extended restrictions period once again brought the grim reality into focus that the trade and other activities suffer immensely owing to close down of all activities. This became visible by the reluctance shown by many small time traders at various trade spots following which a strict action was resorted to by the officials of the Srinagar Municipal Corporation (SMC) which also attracted lot of criticism.
Now that the trade bodies across Jammu and Srinagar had sought a review of the weekend restrictions, stating they have already suffered huge economic losses owing to the outbreak of the pandemic, the new lockdown restrictions on non-essential movement was restricted by seven hours.
Now the restrictions would be from every Friday 9 pm to Monday 6 am and this will mean that trade activities won’t be hampered for long now as the entire day of Friday can be utilized for trading activities across the UT.
The new guidelines seem to be trader friendly and the restrictions on non-essential movement will be now for the weekend period only, but there are certain harsh realities that we cannot ignore.
The new variants of covid-19 are showing a high infectivity rate and this is making a lot of people prone to infections. Though the hospitalizations have not recorded a huge surge but still lots of people across the region have been fighting the new wave of infections.
This gives us a clear indication that the coming few weeks or may be by the mid of February we need to be extra cautious and ensure that all covid-19 measures including CAB is followed in letter and spirit so that a situation like the one that emerged in January does not haunt us one again and the authorities are left with no other option than to enforce another bout of restrictions.
KV Network
