ET View: Extension of lockdown uncalled for

The government is making a hash of loosening restrictions while extending the lockdown. Its guidelines are a bureaucrat’s delight and an administrator’s nightmare. Enforcing the complex guidelines will create the difficulties the guidelines seek to remove, by seeking to resume work in quite a few sectors and geographies.

The guidelines bring in a new category, the containment zone: a locality that poses a threat of spreading Covid-19 and amenable to containment, a single building or a cluster of homes, as the case may be. This is most sensible. The logical corollary would be to divide the country into containment zones and non-containment zones, and allow economic activity to resume in the non-containment zones. Instead, the government has introduced additional shades to Red and Orange, while categorising zones in terms of Covid-19 risk, and allowing differentiated kinds of activity in each shade.

This is bureaucratic self-indulgence, not policy that helps either public health or the economy.