Sitting amid the blackened remains of his home, 32-year-old Nikesh Gawali carefully broke open a half-melted plastic box with a screwdriver. His hands shook slightly, not out of fear, but out of hope. “I’m trying to find my daughter Aarti’s gold earrings,” he said quietly, still focused on the box. “She’s just five. I got them made recently after months of labour work.” The plastic box, warped and blackened by heat, was one of the few things left from his two-room house on the outskirts of Dhamangaon village . All around him lay ash, broken tin sheets and charred wooden beams. The walls had cracked under the heat and the front room’s tin roof had caved in completely. What remained was a blackened debris all around - almost nothing to suggest a home once stood there. Nikesh earns his living as an agricultural labourer, like many in the village. Work is uncertain and depends on the season. Those earrings weren’t just jewellery - they were a small dream, a reward for his hard work,...
AFTER massive spread of coronavirus among the attendees of Markaz Tablighi Jamaat in Nizamuddin at Delhi, Maharashtra Government launched a hunt to identify persons from the State who had gone to the annual gathering. Nagpur police have received a list of 60 attendees who had gone to the congregation, according to sources.
Joint Commissioner of Police (Joint CP) Ravindra Kadam informed that the police and other departments are working together to trace the attendees. “They would be taken for the coronavirus test as preventive measure,” he said.
The Union Home Ministry has alerted all States to identify the attendees. A list of suspected attendees were also sent to Maharashtra Government. Office of Director General of Police (DGP) Maharashtra has forwarded list of attendees to police units with a list of dos and don’ts, claimed sources.
Nagpur Police have received names of 60 persons from city who had gone to the congregation. However, the authorities are suspecting that the actual number could be bigger than that received in the list. “A big number of persons had gone by railways and they are not traceable,” claimed sources. The attendees took part in several religious events.
Joint teams of police and health department will start operations in the city on Wednesday. After finding symptoms of Covid-19, contact mapping of these attendees would be done and they would be taken for the test, said an official and added that the area would be cordoned off during the operation.
It may be mentioned here that the headquarters of a religious sect in Delhi’s Nizamuddin area has emerged as one of the biggest Covid-19 hotspots in India with 24 people testing positive and nearly 200 others showing symptoms when officials began evacuating the six-storey building of some 1,400 people who are believed to have been exposed to the virus.
The building belongs to the Tablighi Jamaat that hosted this month its annual congregation with attendees coming from several foreign nations such as Indonesia and Malaysia before they spread out to other parts of the country such as Kashmir and Andhra Pradesh, creating a web of close contacts that now threatens to create an explosion of cases in the country.
Eight of these people, including seven who went to Hyderabad and one who went to Srinagar, have succumbed to the disease. The Hyderabad deaths took place on Monday.
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