Mumbai: The special two-day monsoon session of the Maharashtra legislature started on a chaotic note Monday as state government employees and some legislators crowded outside the building without maintaining social distance.
The government employees and legislators queued up outside the Vidhan Bhavan (Maharashtra legislature building) as they awaited the results of their Covid-19 tests and hoped those manning the gates would have them.
The Maharashtra government had decided to admit only those with a negative Covid-19 report in the past 48 hours inside the state legislature. It had set up a testing camp at the Vidhan Bhavan on 5 and 6 September. Legislators were also given the option of getting tested in their own districts and submitting the report to the state legislature.
“There was a lot of crowding and confusion at the gate,” 76-year-old Haribhau Bagde, a BJP MLA and former speaker, told ThePrint.
“I had gotten myself tested Sunday afternoon at the special camp organised by the government at Vidhan Bhavan and was told that the result will be made available to me at the legislature building’s gate. I reached the venue at 10 am,” Bagde added.
“There was a single queue for government employees and legislators alike and all our test reports were being checked at a desk. They didn’t have my report. I was asked for it, but I didn’t have it either.”
He said there were at least seven more legislators, across parties, who had to wait outside along with the crowd as there was no clarity on their Covid-19 test reports. This included ministers from Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray-led cabinet too, such as Sandipanrao Bhumre and Dadaji Bhuse.
Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar later intervened and asked authorities to check the Covid-19 test results of legislators on priority and let them go inside at the earliest.
There was also no clear protocol in place for what a legislator or a government employee should do if he or she tests positive for Covid-19. They would find out their results only at the Vidhan Bhavan gate, after having stood along with several others for hours.
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‘A little delay is expected’
Bhumre, a Shiv Sena legislator who holds the employment guarantee and horticulture portfolios, however, said there wasn’t any “major confusion” and dismissed reports of crowding at the gate.
“It’s just that some of our Covid test reports took some time to come. Thoda tar vilamb honarach (A little delay is expected),” he told ThePrint.
A senior official at the state legislature, who did not wish to be named, said, “Our staff was updating reports in a computerised database at the gate till almost 2.30-3 am Monday, but it rained heavily after that and we had to move the equipment hurriedly due to which the exercise couldn’t be completed on time. We lost about 2.5-3 hours because of the rain.”
The state government had decided to go ahead with the monsoon session on 7 and 8 September after deferring it on two occasions due to the ongoing pandemic. According to procedure, there has to be an assembly session within six months of the previous one.
Not only Monday, similar crowding was observed outside the Vidhan Bhavan over the weekend too as people lined up to get tested. Nearly 2,200 government staffers, police personnel to be posted at Vidhan Bhavan, MLAs, MLCs and their staff members got themselves tested.
Of these, at least 45 government employees, police personnel and seven MLAs have tested positive so far.
“Many MLAs got their tests done privately. We do not know how many of them tested positive as they neither uploaded their reports nor attended the session. Only one MLA sent a letter saying he has tested positive and will not be able to attend the session,” the official quoted above said.
Two other MLAs — Prajakt Tanpure, a minister of state from the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Shiv Sena MLA Mahendra Dalvi — had tweeted about their Covid-positive status.
‘Glimpse of how MVA government is managing things’
The Maharashtra BJP, meanwhile, slammed the Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA)
government, comprising the Shiv Sena, NCP and the Congress, for poor planning amid a raging pandemic.
Atul Bhatkalkar, a senior BJP functionary and an MLA said, “The chaos at the gate today (Monday) and over the weekend for testing is a small picture of how the government is managing the crisis in Maharashtra. If the state government can’t even manage such a small number of tests efficiently, it speaks volumes about the testing across the state. It is the utter failure of this government.”
Ashish Shelar, former BJP state minister and MLA, also said the state government should have tested its employees a day prior to the beginning of the monsoon session so that their results would have been received on time.
Maharashtra is struggling with a high Covid-19 tally, having recorded 9.07 lakh cases until now, accounting for more than a fifth of India’s caseload.
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