VIPs and senior officials in Arunachal Pradesh could be named and shamed on social media, if they evade screening at checkpoints for the COVID-19 pandemic .
Arunachal Pradesh, unscathed by the virus, has temporarily banned the entry of outsiders. But geography often forces its inhabitants to travel from one part of the frontier State to the other through Assam, where some 80,000 people have undergone screening for suspected infection, while 41 are in isolation wards.
According to police officials in Arunachal Pradesh, many VIPs and senior officers have not stopped their cars or convoys for voluntary screening by medical teams stationed at highway checkpoints on the border with Assam.
ADVERTISEMENT
“We have directed police teams at checkgates to take photos of such VIPs and senior officers who do not cooperate with the police or medical teams and escape scanning or screening. The photos will be uploaded on social media,” said Tumme Amo, Superintendent of Police of the Capital Complex, comprising Itanagar and Nagarlagun towns 13 km apart.
Health officials in Arunachal Pradesh said more than 32,600 people had been screened at the four entry points to Itanagar. None of them was found to have unusually high body temperature.
Forcible quarantineADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
A 130-year-old law enacted to tackle bubonic plague in the erstwhile Bombay state has inspired the Mizoram government to come up with the Mizoram Epidemic (COVID-19) Regulations, 2020. It facilitates the use of force to quarantine and isolate people.
Home Minister R. Lalthangliana said it was necessary to invoke the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897, to minimise the risk the pandemic poses. He said 156 people who returned from abroad had been put under home quarantine, though they did not show any symptom.
The Mizoram police have said 42 entry points along the State’s international and inter-State borders have been closed, while 15 people, most of them women, have been arrested for spreading fake news on social media.