Gap Between Actual & Monitored Foreign Returnees, Says Cabinet Secretary

The country’s senior-most bureaucrat, Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba has said there was a gap in the number of international passengers who should have been monitored and the actual number. In view of this, he has asked state governments to step up the surveillance of international passengers who reached India before the government banned commercial flights from abroad, reported Hindustan Times.

“This may seriously jeopardise our efforts to contain the spread of Covid-19, given that many amongst the people who have tested positive for Covid-19 so far in India have a history of international travel,” the Cabinet Secretary said in a letter to all chief secretaries on Thursday.

Hindustan Times accessed the letter. The newspaper reported that the letter did not indicate the total number of passengers who were under surveillance. However, it underlined that the Home Ministry’s Bureau of Immigration had “shared details of more than 15 lakh incoming international passengerswith the States/UTs for monitoring for Covid-19”.

“It is important that they are put under close surveillance to prevent the spread of the epidemic,” the letter says.

Before this, the Health Ministry had sent repeated messages to the states to step up surveillance of foreign returnees. Since there was a lukewarm response, the top bureaucrat took up the issue again.

“I understand that the Ministry of Health has repeatedly emphasised this and requested the states and UTs to take immediate steps in this regard. I would therefore like to request to ensure that concerted and sustained action is taken urgently to put such passengers under surveillance immediately as per MOHFW guidelines,” says Gauba’s letter.

The Bureau of Immigration list that was sent often didn’t have complete and accurate information about the passengers, said the report quoting state government officials.

In Bihar’s Muzaffarpur and Saran districts, for instance, the authorities have been able to locate only 385 of the 500 people mentioned in the Centre’s list.

“In some cases, people had mentioned their international contact numbers, which had made it difficult for us to track them… However, through our anganwadi sevikas and teachers, we have now been able to track more than 250 out of 300-odd ‘missing cases’ in our district, and only 30-odd now remain to be located,” said Saran District Magistrate Subrat Kumar Sen, in the newspaper report.