Beating back the pandemic in Mumbai

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has been meeting the second wave of the COVID-19 challenge on a war footing. Sonam Saigal reports on how the civic body learnt lessons from the first wave and adopted a decentralised approach which is showing results slowly but surely

For six years, 42-year-old Surekha Mane spent most of her days teaching history and geography to students from Classes 5 to 8. Her run-of-the-mill routine was suddenly upended in January this year. Now, she is part of the large team of fighters. Mane works at a disaster control room, or ward ‘war room’, in Mumbai, where she answers distress calls from those showing symptoms of or from their families and diligently notes down their details. The job is hectic. On May 13, Mane answered 23 phone calls on one of the 15 lines in the ‘war room’ at ‘E’ ward. “The first thing I do when I answer a call is to take down the contact number of the person calling in case the line gets disconnected,” she says.