This city offers clues to the future of India's virus battle

Pimpri-Chinchwad, the automotive, engineering and IT hub lying between Mumbai and Pune, could well provide the answer to India’s battle against covid-19. The twin city of 2 million has braved the pre-covid economic slowdown, the coronavirus outbreak and the consequent shutdown. Now, a second wave of patients are testing positive, with six new cases on 4 April.

The twin city precedes India’s tryst with covid-19 by almost a fortnight. This holds lessons for the rest of the country, especially industrial towns with large migrant populations.

“We are keenly watching the trajectory. We have tested more than 2,200 samples for Pune division, including Pimpri-Chinchwad, and are taking the next steps,” said Dr Deepak Mhaisekar, Pune divisional commissioner.

The first five cases in Pimpri-Chinchwad surfaced early in the second week of March, with four out of five patients not having any travel history. Immediately, Section 144 of CrPC was invoked and markets, educational institutes and entertainment centres were closed down by the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) and Pune divisional commissioner.

By 20 March, when the total number of covid-19 cases in India was at 230, Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray ordered all industries and workplaces, barring those dealing in essential items, to shut down.

Streets emptied out, spanking new malls and shopfronts were shuttered, real estate activity halted, and the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation complex at Bhosari shut down, as migrants across classes left the city and info-tech companies fell silent.

Pimpri-Chinchwad has several large IT clusters with ITes, BPO, KPO companies, and back offices of large MNCs. PCMC officials and the police knocked on the doors of the few that dared to violate the shutdown, forcing them to shut shop.

“Dange Chowk, where daily wage labourers gathered every morning, used to have 500-600 of them on any given day. It’s a barometer of Pimpri-Chinchwad much like the IT sector. By 15 March, the crowd had thinned and within the next couple of days, there was no one at the chowk,” said Kiran Pandare, a packaging industry professional and local resident.

PCMC micro-managed the lockdown with officials breaking up into groups, dividing the city into clusters, and launching door-to-door inspection of each cluster to map people so that positive cases could be identified and home-quarantined. Eight municipal schools were turned into temporary shelters for the remaining migrants, with the PCMC and social organizations providing daily essentials. The Yashwantrao Chavan Memorial Hospital was vacated of all other patients to exclusively treat covid-19cases. “All this enabled us to cap the infections till now,” said Dr Mhaisekar.

The second wave of patients testing positive is linked to the hundreds of people returning from Nizamuddin’s Tablighi Jamaat, said PCMC officials. A list of 344 names in Pune division, including Pimpri-Chinchwad, was circulated to trace them and their associates or family members. As many as 213 were found and forced into home-quarantine.

The post-lockdown days would be difficult, said PCMC commissioner Sharvan Hardikar. Industries, IT companies, and small and medium scale units will sputter back to life as migrants begin to return, he said. There’s no way to know if they are asymptomatic carriers of Covid-19. There is also no way to keep PCMC, the industrial and commercial hub, shuttered.

“PCMC was in some sort of recession already before the virus hit,” said Pandare. “This was like a double whammy for us. Who knows if and when the city will recover,” he said.

Smruti Koppikar is a Mumbai-based journalist.