Protests against quarantine centres

Protests have erupted in several south Bengal districts against establishment of Covid-19 quarantine centres despite chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s appeal to people not to oppose such facilities. One person was killed by a crude bomb in a clash that broke out over the establishment of a quarantine centre at a hostel in Birbhum’s Parui. Sources said residents of at least half a dozen areas of south Bengal had made their objections clear to police and government officials. Nasiruddin Sheikh, a marginal farmer, was killed by crude bombs while leading a protest against the setting-up of a quarantine centre at the girls’ hostel in Talibpur village on Saturday evening. Police sources said two groups of people belonging to rival factions of Trinamul — with opposing views on whether the quarantine centre should come up there — had clashed. The episode had also taken a political turn with Birbhum Trinamul Congress leaders like Anubrata Mondal claiming that BJP workers were spreading false rumours in rural areas. “We have information that a group of BJP workers and leaders at the local level are instigating people to launch such protests against quarantine centres,” said Mondal. On Sunday morning, a group of villagers in Hooghly’s Goghat blocked a road adjacent to a newly constructed godown of the food and supply department that had been proposed by the local administration as the site of a quarantine centre. The local administration said they would send a team to the village to make people aware of the role of quarantine centres as places where contacts of primary Covid-19- patients would be kept isolated. In another development, a group of residents of Chinsurah in Hooghly on Sunday agitated in front of a private hospital for over an hour after it was selected by the government as an isolation centre for symptomatic and suspected Covid-19 patients.