New Delhi: India is opening up, with restaurants, malls, places of worship and even salons being given the green light to restart business after almost 10 weeks of lockdown. But the rise in Covid numbers is showing no signs of slowing down, and low testing continues to be a problem.
ThePrint’s reporters and photojournalists have been travelling across India to bring you accurate eyewitness accounts of how the coronavirus pandemic is unfolding in different states. They have spoken to migrant labourers trying to get home, vegetable and fish sellers in deserted markets, doctors, police officers and other frontline workers, government authorities, Covid patients and their families to tell you how the virus and the lockdown are impacting the lives of Indians.
This week, our journalists visited the just-reopened Tirupati temple in Andhra Pradesh, the garment factories in Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu, as well as Hyderabad’s Gandhi Hospital where doctors were protesting after one of them was allegedly attacked by a relative of a Covid patient who didn’t survive.
Tirupati reopens, Tiruppur’s garment industry races to catch up
Tirupati’s iconic Sri Venkateswara temple reopened to the public on 11 June after almost 80 days. ThePrint’s Revathi Krishnan and Manisha Mondal visited the temple and found that strict rules were in place in terms of social distancing, wearing of masks, temperature checks and sanitation. The temple that would earlier see 75,000-90,000 visitors every day, is now allowing only around 6,000 devotees a day, roughly 500 an hour.
Even the number of staffers currently working at the temple is now lower than usual. Given that shaving off one’s hair in donation is a common practice here, there would earlier be 1,300 barbers on the premises, but now there were only 500. Read more here.
Around 450 km from Chennai, Tiruppur is known as the knitwear capital of India, accounting for 90 per cent of India’s cotton knitwear exports. While the main item produced is t-shirts, Tiruppur’s factories also churn out jeans and other apparel, which are exported to the US, Australia and across Europe, for clients such as Zara, GAP, H&M and Puma.
The industry here, which employs around 6 lakh people, has an annual turnover of Rs 52,000 crore, but the pandemic and lockdown led to major losses. While most of the factories were shut all this while, the few that remained open had no takers for clothes, they instead turned their focus to making PPE gear such as masks and gowns. But now, the factories are reopening and when ThePrint team visited, it found a garment hub buzzing with activity, with sanitation and distancing measures in place. Read more here.
A Covid victim’s angry family, tired doctors and testing times
Telangana’s rising Covid cases and mortality rate that’s even higher than the worst-hit state, Maharashtra, are a cause for concern, and that concern is compounded by the fact that the state government is still preventing private healthcare establishments from joining in the testing. This is despite the fact that the state’s inadequate testing has already come under heavy criticism from its High Court as well as the Union government.
ThePrint’s Aneesha Bedi and Suraj Singh Bisht have been travelling across Telangana, and spoke earlier this week to the Health Minister Eatala Rajender who rubbished the claims that the state government is mishandling the crisis. But when they visited Gandhi Medical College & Hospital in Secunderabad, doctors disagreed. They told ThePrint that the state government had not addressed their repeatedly expressed concerns regarding PPE kits or accommodation for doctors so the exhausted doctors could work in shifts
The hospital plunged into another crisis as 200 doctors went on strike after one of them was allegedly attacked with an iron chair by the relative of a Covid patient who didn’t survive. The attack led to widespread anger among the hospital staff who have already been coping with being severely overworked. Read more about Telangana’s Covid crisis here and here.
Also read: Chennai’s fisherfolk set for business, while Telangana’s brick workers vow never to return