“All hands on deck” is a call by a captain when his ship is faced with an emergency, asking all fellow seamen to drop everything and assist in sailing through that predicament, say a storm, by taking care of their respective responsibilities or whatever task is assigned to them.
It is anybody’s guess that the tsunami of the second wave of Covid-19 demanded, and does demand, an all-hands-on-deck strategy to ably handle the situation to minimise loss of life, with maximum utilisation of resources, and do it without creating any undue panic among the public by keeping a balanced approach between denying the existence of the problem or foolishly projecting the surrender of the system and government against the problem.
One would assume that a state government, nothing less than that of national capital Delhi, with all the intelligent manpower at its disposal in the form of bureaucracy, its leaders and well-wishers, and of course a CM like no other, as acclaimed by his party men, would handle it in a copybook style and smoothly sail through this storm.
Isn’t it obvious to assume that they as a standard management approach would have broken down the oncoming challenge well in advance, way before the month of March, when the spike in Covid-19 numbers started showing up, understanding its expected scale with predictive analysis on the basis of multiple data points available through daily numbers of testing, positivity rate and similar second wave data pertaining to other big cities of the world? That they would have put together a team of world-class experts to make predictive charts and possible scenarios?
One would assume that they would have listed out all possible dimensions of the problem and respective expertise required and would have onboarded the domain experts, sat around with medical health professionals, held meetings of all hospitals, or at least all the big ones for sure, thought of availability of treatment consumables and flagged it to the suppliers, worked out the required logistics, put the logistic companies on alert and made plans to cut down and better manage turnaround times, and, of course, have contingency plans in place if the number of cases spiral beyond expectation. Isn’t it?
One would also assume that they would have then got down to work, started executing their plans, apprised the frontline workers about what is going to be upon them and created certain communication channels for smooth flow of information. Also, they must have created a two-way information network early in the day to get the feedback from the ground and worked extra hard to ensure that there is no hoarding and black-marketing of essentials, that there is no misinformation and there is no panic and they are always two steps ahead of the problem. Isn’t it so?
What we have instead seen and experienced in Delhi is nothing but a complete breakdown of the state government apparatus. Much of it has been exposed threadbare during various hearings in the Honourable High Court. One doesn’t doubt the capacity of the well-intentioned bureaucracy or the whole state machinery. They are definitely experienced and equipped to think much deeper and in finer detail to chalk out such plans and work out a flawless response mechanism. The problem it seems is not in the capacity but the focus of the state government leadership. What has glaringly come out in the public domain in the past few weeks is that there has been a total lack of understanding of the problem, forget any preparation or planning.
Rather in the middle of rising cases and increasing positivity rate, the chief minister was busy encouraging more and more people to join the fake Kisan Andolan, spreading the disease further and literally choking the lifeline of Delhi.
The fact that not a single hospital has been made in 6 years of his rule has exposed the claims of this government having created a world-class healthcare system in Delhi. There has been a total lack of coordination with hospitals; in fact, changing protocols and guidelines for hospitals from time to time has led to chaos. On the oxygen front, it is even worse: the state government failed to get most of the 8 PSA oxygen plants readied even many months after the funds had been sanctioned by the central government while not picking up its quota of oxygen allotted by the Centre. Worse still, two of the biggest oxygen suppliers were not managed properly, resulting in a fabricated oxygen shortage. All this ultimately led to multiple deaths at Jaipur Golden Hospital and Batra Hospital due to lack of oxygen. The list of failures of this government is long and it doesn’t look like failure anymore but a dereliction of duty as indicated by the Honourable High Court multiple times.
Surprisingly, on top of this, the state government attempted to soften the judiciary by arranging beds for it with five-star facility that triggered a backlash as the High Court refused to accept any such facility.
While the state government was supposed to be managing this pandemic with some serious effort, coordination and management, with heads buried deep in its work, we rather see the CM almost daily with his face plastered on almost every other TV channel and newspapers of states far and wide of all possible languages and regions in the nooks and corners of the country.
Owing to the failure of the state government, the city has lost innumerable lives that could have been saved with some planning, prompt action, judicious use of resources and funds. We don’t want to lose more lives. Delhi has suffered because of the incompetence of its government, busy trying to escape its responsibility and its fascination with advertisements running into hundreds of crores to cover the mess.
The courts, social organisations and efforts by unrecognised, unacknowledged groups have been the saviours. They are doing what the Delhi government could not do: plan and execute.
One wonders if Delhi deserved better.
(Sumit Maluja is an activist and social worker primarily working in the areas of environment, art and culture. Views expressed are personal)
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