Ggm admin gets 2,000 requests for curfew passes after April 14, all rejected

With apprehensions rife that the ongoing 21-day lockdown may be extended, hundreds of city residents have applied for curfew passes after April 14. The administration,

With apprehensions rife that the ongoing 21-day lockdown may be extended, hundreds of city residents have applied for curfew passes after April 14. The administration, however, has rejected all such requests.

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A 21-day lockdown was initiated by put by Prime Minister Narendra Modi from March 25 to curb the spread of Covid-19.

An official familiar with the development told HT that close to 2,000 new applications were received in the past two days from people asking for curfew passes after April 14.

“But we are not approving any such applications, as there is no government instructions in this regard,” said the official, adding that those applications were rejected as they did not fit the current format.

The official said that the district administration of Gurugram received 52,586 applications for curfew passes till date; of which 15,700 applications were approved.

Of the 15,700 curfew passes, close to 12,000 passes are active as on date and around 500 passes are valid till April end, while the remaining 11,500 curfew passes will lose its validity on Tuesday.

“We believe around 3,000 to 3,500 curfew passes were approved to employers and employees for salary disbursements for a couple of days between March 30 and April 7 and they must have exhausted. For the remaining, there are multiple reasons. Some applied for supplying essential goods as retailers or main suppliers, while some applied for medical consultancy. Others wanted the passes for essential duties such as water and electricity supply. We rejected almost 70 percent applications on basis of the reasons given. We have no instructions from the government till date to issue passes after April 14,” said the official adding that the administration issued curfew passes with strict restrictions.

A team of four officials KS Dhaka, CEO zila parishad, Inderjeet Kulharia, joint commissioner, MCG, Ramesh Ahuja, deputy labour commissioner and Manveer Singh, district revenue officer worked on issuing the curfew passes.

In order to facilitate the curfew passes for lockdown period, an online application format was developed and it was integrated with the mobile application that one could easily download from Google playstore and use to send requests.

“The process was made easy with few conditions – people had to attach his or her personal identity documents, supporting documents provided by agency or company he or she was associated with and passport size photograph. The entire administration and GMDA and officials of all other department, police worked day and night to make the lockdown successful. Not only curfew passes, GMDA’s I-CCC (integrated command and control centre) did play a crucial role during the lockdown period to monitor entire district with 300 plus CCTV cameras,” said VS Kundu, chief executive officer GMDA.