Delhi wants to hit pause on MHA order to reopen shops, caught in a bind

The situation will be reviewed by the Delhi Disaster Management Authority’s top committee before extending the lockdown relaxation to Delhi.

Updated on: Apr 25, 2020, 12:24:46 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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The Delhi government has decided to ask the Centre to clarify the kind of shops that can be allowed to open amid the ongoing national lockdown. The clarification will be raised by Chief Secretary Vijay Dev at a video conference convened by Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba that started a short while earlier.

A vendor seen inside a shop during lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus, at Mehrauli, in New Delhi. (Amal KS/HT PHOTO)

“We are going to seek clarifications from the central government on the order,” the person mentioned above said on condition of anonymity. For one, the kind of shops that the Home Ministry wants to reopen.

Left to itself, the city government was reluctant to allow shops apart from those selling essential commodities to reopen at this point given the high number of Covid-19 cases in the national capital.

Delhi has reported a total of 2,514 Covid-19 patients till last night, 128 of them within the previous 24 hours. “We need to get a grip on the situation first rather than fritter away the gains made,” the functionary said.

Also Read: Covid-19 lockdown: Govt allows shops to reopen. Here’s what will open and what won’t

But the home ministry’s midnight order caught them off-guard.

Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Lt Governor Anil Baijal also discussed the government’s next steps on home ministry order.

Also read| Covid-19: What you need to know today

The consensus was that people have gone ahead to open their shops after accessing the home ministry order on the Internet and it was going to be impossible to get them to go home.

One Delhi government official upset at the home ministry’s surprise move summarised the city administration dilemma, saying they couldn’t send the police after shopkeepers shut the shops again.

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“I think the Centre should have consulted the states… at least given them a heads-up before putting out the orders,” he said.

In a late night order on Friday, Union home secretary Ajay Bhalla had allowed neighbourhood shops, standalone shops and shops in residential complexes to open on the condition that they operate with half the strength and enforce social distancing norms.

Click here for the latest updates from the coronavirus outbreak

Bhalla issued the order in his capacity as chairperson of the National Executive Committee of the National Disaster Management Authority.

For the central orders to be implemented, each state authority has to issue a separate set of orders to departments under its charge such as the police and health departments.

On 19 April, the Delhi state executive committee led by chief secretary Vijay Dev had frozen the lockdown 2.0 ground rules and “decided against any relaxation for additional activities till another comprehensive assessment on April 27 is carried out.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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