Valley Lockdown 3.0 : Results and Effects on Our Society.

Nasir Altaf Lone

It was March 2020 when Prime Minister of India announced the lockdown throughout the country, but our valley is under lockdown straight for the third year, following 5^th August 2019 when the Govt. of India revoked the autonomy of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir and divided it into two union territories, this followed the clampdown of mobile and internet services as well as landline telephone services were suspended for more than three months, people were confined to there homes.

After several months relaxation was given in phased manner and later on also mobile, internet and other telecom services were restored. The reason why I am writing this here is to remind the readers that our valley was under the restrictions before the surge of Coronavirus.

The administration of J&K following the instructions of central government ordered the curfew like restrictions again in the march 2020,it was during the first wave of Covid19,the people of yelled at the world that we are facing the lockdown inside the other lockdown.

The people of valley behaved nicely with the administration understanding the threat of losing their lives to the Covid, it was one of the places having low death rate and less surge in Covid19 positive cases. Thanks to the Covid warriors who day in and day out worked tirelessly and fought for the people

We can say that the second lockdown post the covid had worked very well as people were now recovering and death rate was also lower than the rest of the India. But it had very bad effect on the working class, those who earned in daytime for their food in evening suffered a lot. Thanks to numerous NGO’s of our valley who took care of these families in this tough time, almighty knows what would have happened if these organizations were not present here.

Now coming to the second wave of coronavirus it seems to be more challenging as more people are dying now, mainly due to the deficiency of oxygen, again the NGO’s are doing a commendable job beside the medical staffers.

Now again during the  second wave of Covid19 in Kashmir, the working class which includes Laborers, Transporters, Shopkeepers and Street vendors have been wrecked in the lockdown, the poor has become the poorest. The Govt. needs to come up with people friendly policies for the markets so that they can also earn the bread for their families.

In past times we had Bait-ul-Maal in every society which would reach the every household during the restrictions but at present it seems so difficult to collect the same for the people because of the struggling economy rate of the valley.

What Can We Do to Help ?

• We must help each other not only on religious grounds and on the basis of caste, color or creed but on humanistic basis
• All the government employees of the valley be it the teachers, engineers, doctors, policemen ,revenue officials, etc. everyone must come forward and donate at least their (one month salary) in Bait-ul-Maal
• All NGO’s of our valley must come under a single umbrella and form a body to look after the issues of the people and look after to the same Bait-ul-Maal
• As Doctors are available on social forms like WhatsApp, facebook and other social media outlets, we should make people aware about this so that it will be beneficial to everyone
• All mohalla and auqaf committees should look after the poor households and also share the details with the NGO’s, so that nobody is left hungry in these tough times
• Also the rich, top businessman and traders should come forward for the donations

There may be other ways also by which we can help the poor people that should also be considered so that we may unitedly fight against this virus. Else God forbid we may see people soon dying of starvation which has remained far from the valley.