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Rajasthan: SHO to blacksmith, citizens help build sanitising tunnel
Jaipur: Brij Bhushan Agarwal, the station house officer (SHO) of Bagru police station near Jaipur, had just returned from a highway patrol on March 28 when he came
Jaipur: Brij Bhushan Agarwal, the station house officer (SHO) of Bagru police station near Jaipur, had just returned from a highway patrol on March 28 when he came across a video of a sanitising tunnel installed in Turkey for pedestrians to check the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
Agarwal shared the video with Madan Choudhary, a schoolteacher, and asked him whether they could do something similar. “Discuss it with Ehsaan Engineer,” he told Chaudhary, referring to Ehsaan Lohar, 34, who works at a workshop in Bagru. Lohar is better known as Engineer because of his metal fabrication skills. Choudhary called Agarwal later in the day saying they could create a similar tunnel. “Ehsaan Engineer has developed the design,” he told him.
An eight-foot-long, 50-inch-wide and seven-foot-high sanitising tunnel was installed five days later on April 2. The tunnel is equipped with eight nozzles attached to its iron frame that spray sanitiser. It has been installed at Jaipur’s Laxmi Chowk, where additional police commissioner Ashok Gupta was the first to walk through it.
“Officers in police stations normally don’t think out of the box like this SHO. I am happy a police officer could go beyond the call of his duty in the fight against this pandemic,” Gupta said.
At least three other sanitising tunnels have come up around the country over the last week. In Tamil Nadu’s Tirupur, an entrepreneur set up a portable disinfectant tunnel at the vegetable and fish market on April 1. The Srinagar Municipal Corporation installed a similar tunnel at the entrance of a hospital, where Covid-19 patients are being treated. Another sanitising tunnel has come up in Ahmedabad for healthcare workers.
Sanitising tunnels have been set up at many places across the world including in China, where the pandemic originated from, since businesses reopened there as curbs and other measures to contain the virus were eased with a drop in the number of infections.
Agarwal said he called up Yogesh Singhal, an engineer and his schoolmate, when Lohar said he could put together a structure similar to what he had seen in the video. “When he [Singhal] approved our design, we knew we were on the right track,” he said.
Lohar, Abdul Hameed, Suresh Kumawat, Kamaruddin Lohar and Zakir Hussain, who owns the workshop, began their work on the tunnel on March 29. Lohar, Hameed and Kamaruddin worked on the iron frame. Kumawat, a reverse osmosis mechanic, bought pipes and Choudhary arranged for sprayers commonly used by barbers.
A 20-litre plastic tank fitted to the frame has been filled with the sanitisers. A pressure machine used by mechanics pumps the sanitisers into the sprayers using thin pipes used in water purifiers. The tunnel’s entry and exit points are covered with a thick plastic sheet. A shop nearby houses the motor that keeps the pressure pump on and bottles of sanitizer tinctures.
While Lohar and his co-workers were busy making the tunnel, Agarwal was trying to figure out what sanitisers to use. “The disinfectant chemicals being used by municipal authorities may not be fit to be used on human bodies. So I turned to a homoeopathic doctor,” he said.
Arvind Dadhich, 30, the homoeopath, suggested five tinctures of Azadirachta Indica, Ocimum Sanctum, Echinacea, Sambucus Nigra and Iodum mixed with spirit and water and said it can be used as a sanitiser. These are mother tinctures used in homeopathy.
Dr Renu Bansal, director (homoeopathy), the government of Rajasthan, said the mixture used in the tunnel is safe to be used as a sanitiser. “The mother tinctures have around 65% alcohol, and when mixed with spirit, the overall alcohol percentage comes to around 70-75%, which is good for a sanitiser. The solution is also anti-bacterial,” she said.
Virendra Singh, a former professor of medicine at Jaipur’s SMS Medical College, warned that people should continue wearing masks even while walking through the tunnel. “If an infected person sneezes in the tunnel, the virus is likely to hang in there for some time.”
Singh said, “I haven’t seen it but theoretically seems to be an effective way.”
Razia Bano, 38, an (accredited social health activist who has been going door to door for a Covid-19 survey, walks through the tunnel on her way to Bagru.
A bus from a nearby nursing college stops near the tunnel and students, who have been put on screening duty, stand in a queue to pass through it. “We use sanitisers only for our hands. This will sanitise our full bodies,” said a student, who did not want to be named.
Agarwal’s phone has not stopped ringing since the tunnel was installed. “My colleagues are calling me after watching the tunnel on local TV channels. They want to replicate it,” he said.
