Shortage of safety equipment crippling states’ Covid-19 containment efforts

Admitting the shortage, UP health secretary, Amit Mohan Prasad said 31 units in the state had started manufacturing kits and that the government had also placed orders with other companies.

Updated on: Apr 6, 2020, 06:07:19 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Chetan Chauhan

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In India’s two biggest states -- Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra that have nearly a thousand cases between them -- health officials admitted to a shortage of PPE, saying that private companies had expressed their inability to provide the kits early because of an increase in demand. This is because of a sudden increase in cases, the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.

Workers manufacturing Personal protective equipment (PPE) suits for the medical staff in Kolkata. (ANI Photo)

Admitting the shortage, UP health secretary, Amit Mohan Prasad said 31 units in the state had started manufacturing kits and that the government had also placed orders with other companies. He did not provide any break-up of the kits needed and procured by the government. A doctor in King George’s Medical University in Lucknow, the largest hospital in the city, has been infected.

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In other states such as Bihar, a large number of health workers have been provided with only masks, gloves and sanitisers -- and not coveralls. “To tide over the shortage of PPE kits, we have requested our doctors to utilise the kits rationally,” said Sanjay Kumar, Bihar’s principal secretary, health.

The situation is no different in Madhya Pradesh’s biggest Covid-19 hot spot Indore, where only half of the health workers have been provided with proper kits.

“Only 20 to 30% of around 55,000 to 60,000 health workers have been provided with proper kits in the state,” said MP’s health department employees’ association leader Laxminarayan Sharma. In the state, eight more health workers and staff tested positive on Sunday. All these officers used to meet one another in meetings held in the state secretariat and the health directorate and monitor implementation of the measures undertaken by the government across the state. At least 50 other officers, including head of the health department, are in self quarantine.

State Commissioner of health services, Faiz Ahmad Kidwai, said, “We are providing PPE kits to health workers as per guidelines of government of India. Currently we are getting supplies from certain companies including some companies based at Indore. We are trying to get about 1.5 lakh kits in the coming days.”

The northern states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttarakhand and the Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Chandigarh have placed orders with private companies for the kits but haven’t received them yet. A health worker each in Chandigarh and J&K and two in Haryana have tested positive for Covid-19.

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In Punjab’s Patiala and Amritsar districts, nurses protested outside hospitals, alleging a shortage of kits even though the official spokesperson for Covid-19, Rajesh Bhaskar, denied the charge. The Punjab cabinet has authorised additional chief secretary Vinni Mahajan to buy kits and masks for medical staff from manufacturers in the state and elsewhere. Haryana minister Anil Vij said tenders had been floated to get the kits.

The eastern states of Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal have also reported a shortage of kits even though local manufacturing has started. Bihar has been supplied 16,700 PPE kits against its demand for 960,000 kits. Another 21,000 PPE kits are in transit. Jharkhand has 13,000 kits as against the demand of 21,000.

Kumar said they were tapping all possible sources to get the kits. Jharkhand’s health minister, Banna Gupta, said the state government had placed orders with various companies. “We have also requested the central government to ensure supply of the kits but they are not listening to us,” Gupta said.

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee has also blamed the Centre although governor, Jagdeep Dhankhar, had claimed that there were enough kits with the state. Doctors in several hospitals in the state have protested and refused to report for work citing inadequate safety equipment.

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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