The picturesque road to Pidawa crosses streams, lush farmlands, rolling hills, and the former ‘badlands’ which are the border areas between Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Pidawa is a small town in the middle of the sliver of Rajasthan that thrusts into Madhya Pradesh. And like many of the habitations in this part of the country, Pidawa too benefitted over the last couple of centuries from a ‘black gold’ rush.
Unlike the better known hydrocarbon of the same name, this ‘black gold’ is extracted from a plant, Papaver somniferum, and is then processed to make opium and its many derivatives. In fact these ‘badlands’ hosted a part of the production facilities that provided the fuel which ignited the Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60. But those days are long gone, and what is now grown is largely legal, although a portion does slip through the system to reach consumers on the western side of Rajasthan.
India coronavirus lockdown Day 58 updates | Helpline numbers
It was another kind of slip through the system that set off a major scare in Pidawa during early April and resulted in the imposition of a stringent curfew across the town. The slip would have gone undetected but for an alert Dr. Raees at the Pidawa Community Health Centre, where Khalida Bi died on April 4.
Those were the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, and the contagion had yet to enter this isolated corner of Jhalawar district, in Rajasthan. On an impulse, Dr. Raees decided to test the family members who had handled the body before burial. They were asked to go to Jhalawar on April 5 to be tested but proved elusive. “We had to take the help of the local police and move them by ambulance on April 6 to Jhalawar for testing, which could only be done by the evening, further delaying matters,’ recalled Dr. Raees. On April 7, three of the five samples taken proved positive, all symptomatic. Dr. Raees and his staff were also tested and put in quarantine, thus closing the CHC until doctors from neighbouring hospitals arrived.
Thus setting in motion a chain of events that were to prove decisive in the containment and eventual elimination of the virus from Pidawa. But before that happened a number of decisions had to be taken. “In hindsight we may have been a bit harsh in imposing curfew over the entire town,” reminisced Sidharth Sihag, Jhalawar District Collector. “We were all in a learning curve about the virus at that time, and didn’t have any other protocols to go by,” he added. He and his Rapid Response Team descended on Pidawa moments after the first positive reports came, and closed the town completely from the midnight of April 7-8. And then began an extensive testing programme