‘Take strict action against those attacking healthcare workers’: MHA to states
The Union Ministry of Home Affairs has written to state governments to take strict action against those who have been found attacking healthcare and frontline workers. The ministry has also asked states to ensure security to the medical fraternity, Punya Salila Srivastava, Joint Secretary, Home Ministry said on Friday.
“There are seven helpline numbers in the control room of the Union Home Ministry. Now, we have introduced two more helpline numbers – 1930 (all India toll-free number) and 1944 (dedicated to the Northeast) for such complaints,” the Home Ministry official said.
Reports of healthcare workers as well as security personnel being attacked have come in from several parts of the country amid the lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. In Madhya Pradesh on Thursday, seven people were arrested for allegedly attacking health workers in Indore. The residents of a locality in the city pelted stones at healthcare workers who went there to screen people for Covid-19. Two female doctors reportedly sustained injuries in the incident.
In another incident, Tablighi Jamaat members quarantined at a Ghaziabad hospital allegedly misbehaved with the nurses, making lewd remarks and other obscene gestures, provoking the Uttar Pradesh government to invoke the stringent National Security Act (NSA) against them.
The six Jamaat members at the district hospital were shifted to an isolation ward set up at a private educational institute after complaints received against them.
They are among the thousands who attended a religious congregation at the organisation’s New Delhi headquarters, now identified as a coronavirus hotspot.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has called those involved in the incident “enemies of humanity”.
“They will neither accept the law nor follow arrangements. Whatever they did with women health workers is a heinous crime,” he said on Friday. “The NSA is being invoked against them. We will not let leave them,” he said, in a government statement in Lucknow.
