The Delhi government has exponentially scaled up its supply of cooked food to those left without resources to feed themselves during the lockdown.
Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Friday announced that 325 schools had been converted into dining halls. From tomorrow, these and the 224 existing night shelters will serve 4 lakh people two meals a day.
The lockdown in Delhi started with the Janata curfew of March 22, which the state government extended till March 31 and the Centre later extended till April 14.
Prohibitory orders prevent any movement outside homes except to access or provide essential services such as food, medicine, electricity, water and policing.
As a result, lakhs of day labourers are out of work and hordes of them are walking hundreds of kilometres back to their villages in northern and eastern India in the absence of transport. Those who can’t leave have been flocking to the night shelters.
The Delhi government was jolted by the extent of hunger it saw on Thursday when 7,000 turned up for lunch at a night shelter in Yamuna Pushta that earlier catered to only 2,000 people.
The free meals that began for 10,000 on March 21 had expanded to 20,000 by Thursday. On Friday, after the schools were turned into dining halls, the figure rose to 2 lakh, which will double by Saturday.
An Aam Aadmi Party government panel has started an online aggregation of voluntary services to provide food.
Kejriwal on Friday thanked the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, Radha Soami Satsang Beas and the gurdwaras in the city, which too are feeding people.
“I have also asked all MLAs to work with their local communities to ensure that no one in their constituency goes hungry. This is in addition to the relief effort being undertaken by the Delhi government,” he said.
“Just like we cannot let anyone die of the coronavirus, we cannot let hunger take any lives.”
Ruling party MLA Somnath Bharti was assigned to track migrant labourers from Jharkhand who were stranded without food in Delhi’s Hauz Rani locality after Jharkhand chief minister Hemant Soren tagged Kejriwal to a tweet with a video of their plight.
AAP cadre traced them at 4am, by when the labourers had already found help.
“They may be from Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu or Kerala, but if they are living in Delhi, they are ours. I want to assure the chief ministers of other states that we will try to ease the difficulties of all the people living in Delhi,” Kejriwal said at a news conference.
Bihar Bhavan too has started a helpline for migrant workers from the state stranded in the capital.
The Kejriwal government has also chalked out standard operating procedures to tackle any higher numbers of Covid-19 patients.
“If we get 100 new cases every day, the current healthcare system we have is enough. A detailed plan has been worked out to see how many isolation beds, ventilators, ICU beds, testing mechanisms, ambulances and medical staff such as doctors and nurses are needed under each head of 100, 500 and 1,000 new cases every day,” Kejriwal said.
“We will start implementing all these plans once the cases rise from 100 per day. We have a detailed plan for treating up to 1,000 new cases per day. But I hope we never reach this stage and that the (current) rise by 4-5 new cases (per day) will also decrease in the future.”
Kejriwal said there was a shortfall of personal protective equipment for frontline staff but these were being procured.
So far, 39 people have tested positive in Delhi.