As the lockdown 2.0 is approaching its deadline if 3rd May 2020, the debate as to the end of lockdown has begun. As the number of coronsvirus rises everyday, so is the impatience among the people to resume their normal lives. Soon the government at both central and state will start discussing the next course of action. Specifically, the governments will try to find the answer to the question “Is there is need to extend the lockdown or if it is needed, can be done with economy in operation with mandatory safeguards”? The answer to this particular question lies at the behavioural responsibility at the individual level.
Since the beginning of the lockdown, media has been proactive in its coverage of people breaking lockdown. What people at various levels has fail to openly acknowledge let alone discuss is the consistent breaking of lockdown everyday. Along with breaking of lockdown, people in their own places of living can see that many individuals even fail to use masks even when home made masks are equally effective along with gloves. The attitude of young individuals is far worse who in their minds has a casual attitude and mostly pretend that coronavirus will not impact them.
Surely, the lockdown has impacted the livelihood of many people, resulting in loss of jobs and poor struggling for keeping their stomach full. But does this unfortunate situation entails not following safety rules of masks and gloves? During visits to shops of essential commodities, many people come up wearing masks, but gradually that mask comes down to the neck and people starts acting casually. This behaviour is also followed by the shop keepers. Any government scheme tailored for covid-19 pandemics announcement leads to flocking of large groups of people to these centres of distribution and most of them dont even make effort of following social distance rules along with masks and gloves.
What is worse is that when these kind of people deal with other people, they assume since they are healthy they can keep aside all the safety norms for resuming their livelihood. This is the primary reason for police person along with many volunteers contracting this disease. When police try to take action, many people uses physical violence even at individual level leading to unwanted contact that simply leads to spread of disease. One of the biggest safety measure during this pandemic is washing of hands. Though all experts suggesting to adopt this safety measure diligently, but how many can say truthfully that they wash hands at regular intervals? In poorer sections, the sanitation is always a problem, so making them follow a must safety precaution is a big challenge.
After the end of lockdown 1.0, it is still unknown that in many cities, the maids have resumed their chores of other’s households. The family who are using their services makes concerted effort to hide this fact. But, the reality is these maids go inside their houses without using masks and gloves and nor people in whose houses these maids work care to strictly enforce safety protocols. Even people think that in hotspot areas, people surely will be following safety protocols, this is also false. Many cities that still has not come out of the hotspot is because people at individual levels keep faltering in following safety rules. Going for walks in morning and at night, going out of homes just because you are at home bored or trying to meet other people to feel sane has contributed significantly to rising number inspite of lockdown.
In small and medium size industries, safety of employees is persistent challenge because these industries deliberately forego safety for the sake of profits. So can it be ensured that they will successfully modify their behaviour and let go of their high profit motive? Though constant surveillance is insisted by experts, but is it possible in a country like India, where at present government officials are already overloaded to constantly monitor the situation. The most likely scenario will be industry workers getting affected and then mechanism will be to quarantine and contain the disease will be deployed.
The bitter reality in today’s crisis is that people deliberately refusing to modify their behaviour for long run. This whole reality can be witnessed by simply opening a shopping mall for one day. Even the educated ones will flock to the shopping mall without caring for their lives as well as others. The coronavirus pandemic is to stay here till a vaccine is found and if people want to resume their livelihood without harm to life, they have to be responsible at individual level. The concept of constant monitoring is not possible in such a pandemic because the disease impact everyone equally. People should take seriously that even lockdown was enforced, the number of patients are still rising.