By Our Staff Reporter
Dehradun, 29 Nov: With Covid-19 cases rising for the past few weeks at an unprecedented rate, the pandemic continues to pose hardship for the entire country. Today, many states in Northern India are experiencing probably the 2nd or even the 3rd wave of rise in infections and mortality. With the onset of winter, the problem is getting accentuated, especially for the vulnerable ones.
While Pandemic fatigue is an expected and natural response to a prolonged public health crisis, there is need to understand and keep in mind the repercussions of dropping the guard not only on the health and safety of those around, but also its impact on work and everyday lives.
Nikhil Sawhney, Chairman, CII Northern Region, has said, “As we can see some signs of a rebound in our economy, the least we would want now would be another spate of shutdowns or closing of our workplaces due to infections. Already, we are seeing that some of the states are again being forced to announce night curfews and restrictions on social gatherings which I would say are not good signs.”
He has written to the industry in North India and urged them to not to lower their guard against Covid-19 and to ensure that the prescribed norms of wearing masks, maintaining physical distance of at least 6 feet, washing hands at regular intervals, avoiding large gatherings, maintaining health and hygiene and boosting immunity are followed.
He said, “We must also ensure that those around us, including family, friends and workforce also follow these rules at all times without fail. At the same time, in our offices, we need to maintain Work from Home policy for a few more months.”
He said that the Government is committed to ensuring the availability of the vaccine and has stated that a definite process is underway for reaching it to the vulnerable sections of society.
In the light of this, it is essential for all industry members to be ready for a period of at least a year of continued vigil and precautionary measures for working towards containing disease prevalence.
CII has prepared a detailed workplace protocol, which has been shared with the industry members to adhere to, including following Work from Home for all offices requiring non-contact activities; ensuring the fullest workplace safety measures where employees are required to be physically present; conducting COVID testing of all employees and their families; aggressively promoting awareness among employees’ families and the larger community; and relentlessly spreading the message of SMS – sanitisation and hand washing, mask wearing, social distancing.
He said that as industry members, it is incumbent on them to remain constantly vigilant, proactively reduce risk and work towards minimising the impact of the pandemic in India.
CII Northern Region comprises 10 States and UTs of North India, namely: Chandigarh, Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Ladakh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.
