Uniform lockdown guidelines for all states soon: Govt

After States like Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Bihar started imposing limited lockdown, the Union Home Ministry said it will come out with detailed instructions to bring a uniform policy binding across all States.

New Delhi: The Union Home Ministry is likely to come with unified lockdown guidelines for across the country starting September 1.

The urgency of such unified lockdown guidelines, according to the sources, was necessitated following the fact that several state governments keep implementing their own lockdown in different forms, "affecting the supply chain".

In fact, Union Home Secretary Dr Ajay Kumar Bhalla has recently in a letter asked the state governments to ensure that movement of essential and goods and services is not affected due to these lockdowns.

"Local lockdown being imposed by state governments affects the movement of goods and trucks of even essential commodities which impact the supply chain," officials said.

States like Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Bihar and a few other states impose lockdown in different forms.

"There is a need to implement unified lockdown guidelines which can be implemented across the country," the official said.

It may be mentioned here that due to the sharp of COVID-19 cases in different places, local authorities of concerned state governments implement different lockdown measures.

Many of the states impose lockdown on Saturday and Sunday, where all business establishments and other services remain closed except essential ones.

"For such unified lockdown guidelines, officials of both the home and the health ministry are consulting each other," officials said.

Earlier, the Central government had given a free hand to the States to impose lockdown if required based on their COVID situation.

Meanwhile, with a single day spike of 61,408 cases, India on Monday registered 31,06,348 COVID positive caseload. As many as 57,542 people have died till date.

India witnessed 57,469 COVID recovery cases in the last 24 hours, taking the total number to 23,38,035 at a rate of 75 per cent.

The total number of active cases at present is 7,10,771 with the fatality rate dipping to 1.85 per cent.

Health Ministry statistics said that a major role in India's substantial rate of recovering and declining case fertility rate has been played by the 'National e-ICU on Covid19 management' exercises being conducted by AIIMS.

"So far, 14 such National e-ICUs have been held covering 117 hospitals of 22 states across India," officials said.

Till date, India has conducted 3,59,02,137 Covid19 tests. Country's testing capacity per million population went up to 26,016 which is far above the WHO's mandate of 140 tests per day per million population.