Covid-19: Nagaland prepared for the worst

Our Correspondent
Kohima, April 6 (EMN): The officer on special duty (OSD), Nagaland State Disaster Management Authority (NSDMA), Johnny Ruangmei, on Monday said that the state is prepared for the worst, while also hoping for the best.

Speaking to Eastern Mirror, Ruangmei shared about the functioning of the state-level control room at present. He said that the NSDMA personnel are manning the centre 24/7 even during normal days, but with the announcement of the lockdown, the workload has increased and they had to bring in experiences technicians to manage it.

Now, the whole NSDMA team has been divided into groups and there are 13 NCS officers in the rank of joint secretaries and deputy secretaries who are working according to the roster, he said. ‘In the control room, we also have representatives from the police, NDRF, IPR; and we all work from morning 8 am till 10 pm on rotation, he added.

He shared that they collect daily report updates from the department of Health and Family Welfare, law and order, and essential commodities. We also have report on the stranded people, migrant labourers and other reports like the foreigners who had entered the state before the lockdown, he added.

“We have the Nizamuddin issue and we are following with the numbers and names that have been provided,” he informed, adding that they collect reports and then disseminate it to the concerned authorities and agencies every evening besides co-ordinating with different agencies “for receiving supports and help”.

He informed that they receive a lot of calls from Nagas living in different parts of the country, and they are trying to reach out to them. “But there are many individual cases, and we are really unable to authenticate their needs and wants because they are not with us and therefore we do not really give heed to the individual cases,” he said.

On this, he added that ‘only if a case is very severe in nature and the situation faced by an individual really deserves help, they step in, or else they reach out to the Naga students’ unions of different states’.

The state-level control room collects all the information and relay it to the concerned authorities for necessary actions, he added.