Varanasi on Saturday provided an example of how an administration can impose immense hardship on people by enforcing the lockdown while neglecting to assuage infrastructural shortcomings.

“At many homes in my neighbourhood, vegetables were missing from meals today because of the administration’s order and the police’s highhandedness,” said Saurabh Singh, a Varanasi-based social worker.

Kaushal Raj Sharma, district magistrate of Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s parliamentary constituency, on Saturday banned customers from visiting the city’s vegetable mandis — which are wholesale-cum-retail markets.

Normally, the retailers buy from the wholesalers early in the morning and sell to customers the rest of the day, with the odd customer turning up early to buy directly from the wholesaler at a cheaper price.

But after the lockdown came into force from Wednesday, “hordes of panicky customers turned up in the early hours on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and bought vegetables directly from the wholesalers”, a local Hindi journalist said.

“The retailers couldn’t buy anything,” the journalist, who asked not to be named, added.

On Saturday, the DM ordered that only wholesalers and retailers would be allowed to enter the mandis in order to ensure social distancing.

He said people could buy vegetables only from vendors at the gates of their colonies, while maintaining enough distance from one another.

Varanasi senior superintendent of police Prabhakar Chaudhary told reporters he had asked police stations to barricade the vegetable mandis to prevent the entry of consumers.

“Legal action would be taken against anyone who defies the order,” he said.

Similar restrictions have been working more or less smoothly in Lucknow, Noida or Agra because most neighbourhoods at these places have bi-weekly vegetable marts and dozens of vegetable kiosks apart from the main city markets.

They also have large numbers of private retailer chains doing home deliveries.

Varanasi, however, has only a few weekly markets —that too mostly on the city’s outskirts. There are hardly any neighbourhood kiosks or regular vendors catering to the colonies. So, the entire burden on Saturday fell on the regular market sellers who had to get pushcarts and trolleys and turn neighbourhood vendor.

Even this ran into difficulties with an apparently clueless police stopping many vendors from approaching the colony gates, and preventing residents from getting near the vendors.

Residents said that before closing the mandis to consumers, the administration should have facilitated a smooth neighbourhood vending system by helping the vendors ferry the vegetables to localities and appropriately instructing the police.

“The administration’s mismanagement has also driven up prices. On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday mornings, customers bought potatoes at Rs 50 a kg, tomatoes at Rs 60 and capsicums at Rs 100 a kg at the mandis — up from Rs 15, Rs 25 and Rs 40 a kg, respectively,” the journalist said.

“Today (Saturday), the vendors were selling these vegetables near our colonies for Rs 70, Rs 80 and Rs 120 a kg. It’s unfortunate that the government didn’t have a plan before imposing the entry sanctions at the mandis.”

Singh, the social worker, said that people across Uttar Pradesh were suffering also because the state police were randomly stopping vegetable trucks on highways.

“Many such trucks are stranded across the state. Today, only a handful of vegetable vendors had come to my neighbourhood till late afternoon because they were still standing in queue at the wholesale markets, thanks to the shortage of supplies,” he said.

“As for the local police in Varanasi, they are wielding their batons on those stepping out to buy anything. The policemen have no idea about the government orders or the situation — all they seem to understand is that people should be prevented from coming out of their homes. So, many families are having to do without vegetables.”