Coronavirus, floods and price rise

Assam has been caught in a really difficult situation. While the number of persons testing positive of COVID-19 has been increasing at a rapid pace in the past few days, the state is also faced with the first wave of floods which has come rather early, thanks to cyclone Amphan the previous week which pushed massive clouds to the Northeast. The BJP-led government headed by Sarbananda Sonowal on the other hand is struggling to arrest the sky-rocketing of prices of various essential commodities and items of daily use. That all these three issues have assumed serious proportions was evident in the fact that these were the basic issues that a marathon meeting of the State Council of Ministers held on Tuesday discussed. It is a fact that Assam, a state which had earned a lot of accolades in the first three or four weeks of the lockdown for having registered very few COVID-19 positive cases, has suddenly found itself as one where number of positive cases have been increasing probably at the fastest rate among all the states of the country. By Wednesday evening, the figure was racing towards becoming 800, while hardly ten per cent of the positive-tested people have been cured and released from hospitals so far. It is in this backdrop that the Sonowal government has taken the right decision to enforce the quarantine guidelines without any leniency and lacunae. With an increasing tendency of flouting the lockdown and quarantine rules becoming visible among some sections of people, the State Council of Ministers has also very rightly decided to take stringent action against people violating the quarantine rules. Meanwhile, as the water-level of the Brahmaputra and many of its tributaries has started registering an upward trend in the past few days, hundreds of villages have been already inundated, and floods have already affected more than 2.7 lakh people across the state. The civil administration at the district level, whose hands are already full because of the arrival of several thousand people from other regions of the country and also because of more people testing positive of COVID-19, are now also required to handle the situation arising out of the floods. That exactly is why the Chief Minister has himself decided to keep in touch with the deputy commissioners at frequent intervals to take stock of the flood situation, while the Chief Secretary will remain in constant touch with the district officials. The Ministers, who are in charge of taking stock of the COVID scene in different districts, will do a similar job for flood and erosion in their respective districts. Providing a boost to the morale of the officers and other government staff especially when they have been working almost round the clock to tackle the twin menace of COVID-19 and floods is very important. How the government proposes to arrest the price rise of essential commodities however remains a big question, and Tuesday's meeting of the State Council of Ministers did not appear to have found a solution to this.