Dharamshala: The provincial government here on Sunday decided to relax restrictions imposed for containing the corona pandemic by starting bus operations from Monday and permitting movement of people from one district to another.
Chief minister Jai Ram Thakur after holding a video conference with district magistrates, district police superintendents and chief medical officers said that since inter district buses would start plying from 1st June, it must be ensured that there was proper social distancing in the buses and at the bus stands. For movement of people, curfew has been relaxed from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.
District magistrates and superintendents of police would provide adequate police force for crowd management and law and order maintenance, said Thakur. Buses would be allowed to ply with not more than 60 percent occupancy and the drivers, conductors and passengers would follow all the safety protocols of the health officers, he added.
The chief minister asked for having in place effective mechanism to sensitize the people about the preventive steps needed to contain the spread of the COVID pandemic.
Inter-district movement of the people would be allowed, but passes would be required for interstate movement, said Thakur. He said that the people coming from other parts of the country would be quarantined.
“People coming from red zones would be kept in institutional quarantine and those from other areas would be kept in home quarantine. Persons under institutional quarantine would be allowed to go home only after their test for COVID-19 was negative,” said the chief minister.
He disclosed that over 1.60 lakh Himachal natives who were stranded in other parts of the country, from 25th April onwards, have returned to the. Of them about 91,000 have been kept under home quarantine and over 7000 under institutional quarantine.
The chief minister asked the health professions to focus on tracing and screening of all the contacts of COVID positive patients to ensure their timely treatment to check the spread of coronavirus.
Arvind Sharma is an award winning bi-lingual journalist with more than 20 years of experience.
He has worked with Divya Himachal, Dainik Jagran, Dainik Bhasker, Vir Partap, Ajit and PTI.
In 2010, he was conferred the Himachal Kesri journalism award. He reports on the Tibetan Government in Exile, politics, sports, tourism and other topics. He lives in Dharamshala.
