Covid-19: Disaster Act invoked for the 1st time in India

New Delhi:

Published on: Mar 25, 2020, 24:12:41 IST

By Chetan Chauhan

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New Delhi:

The 21-day national lockdown imposed by the Narendra Modi government to combat the spread of Covid-19 , and which starts at 12.01 am Wednesday is the first time provisions of the National Disaster Management Act, 2005, are being invoked.

In an order issued by the home ministry, the home secretary as chairperson of the National Executive Committee of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) issued guidelines for the national lockdown for 21 days. The guidelines allow for essential services such as food, utilities, health care, and law and order. Many parts of the country were already under a lockdown till March 31.

A home ministry statement said the decision for a national lockdown was taken at a meeting of the NDMA chaired by the Prime Minister on Tuesday to ensure”uniformity in the measures adopted” and their implementation.

As on Monday evening, 32 states and Union Territories had enforced lockdowns with some ordering a curfew as well, leading to some confusion over what is allowed and what is not.

The lockdown means all rail and air services will also be suspended till April 15.

The statement said the uniform lockdown guidelines would ensure “effective measures” for social distancing needed to contain the spread of the pandemic. “The implementation of the orders will be monitored by MHA,” the statement said.

This marks the first time, since the law came into being after the 2004 Tsunami that hit the eastern coast of India killing about 10,000 people, that the NDMA has invoked it .

The sections 6 and 10, under which the lockdown order was issued, give the NDMA powers to prepare national plans for disaster management and ensure its implementation through the state disaster management authorities in a uniform manner.

By invoking this provision, the authority will become the nodal central agency for coordinating with all state governments to contain the pandemic, ensure uniform disaster management plans, and provide relief funds to the states for disaster management.

“The invocation of the act will ensure better coordination between the Centre and the states and create health infrastructure to cope with community spread, if it happens very fast. The National Disaster Management Act has more clarity than the Epidemic Disease Act, 1897, a colonial era law,” said former NDMA vice-chairperson MS Reddy.

Reddy termed the national lockdown as important decision and said invoking the law will give the government much more power than the Epidemic Act does; the health ministry and several state governments had issued lockdown orders under the latter.

He said the disaster law empowers the Centre to take action against anyone obstructing implementing of national plans, including government officials. “The National Disaster Management Act has much more clarity about various issues related to any calamity including health pandemic,” he said.

The law provides a wide range of powers to the NDMA chairperson, the PM, to seek any “men or material resources” for the purposes of emergency response across the entire country or any specific part of the country. It gives emergency powers to the chairperson to deal with the disaster doing away with bureaucratic processes. The law also allows state disaster management authority chairpersons to exercise similar powers within the state jurisdictions.

Subhash Kashyap, former secretary general of Lok Sabha, said the powers under the disaster law could create a parallel system of disaster management to help doctors and paramedics and can augment government services.

The Constitution does not provide the Centre direct powers to declare a national emergency for medical and pandemic reasons.

There are three types of national emergencies --- national security (Article 352), state (Article 356) and financial (Article 360) defined under the Constitution. While national emergency has been invoked thrice, state emergencies have been imposed several times. Financial emergency has never been imposed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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