Colour-coded travel passes in Chennai soon

Siddharth.Prabhakar@timesgroup.com

Chennai:12.04.2020

The Greater Chennai Corporation will issue travel passes in red, blue and green colours to commuters in the the city in the next few days.

While the general public will get green colour passes, it will be blue for government staff and red for private employees.

General public will get travel passes only for three reasons: Fixed wedding, funeral and emergency medical reasons, corporation commissioner G Prakash said.

This will be in line with a state policy as instructed by commissioner of revenue administration J Radhakrishnan, the civic body chief said.

Deputy commissioner (works) in the GCC will be the authorized entity to issue these passes in the city.

GCC has also requested residents under home quarantine to handover used masks, gloves and other waste to sanitary workers in a yellow bag on a daily basis. The bags would be provided by GCC. Used masks, gloves and other waste should be disinfected using ordinary bleach solution (5%) or sodium hypochlorite solution (1%) and kept in yellow bags exclusively in a closed bin before being handed over to conservancy staff.

As for other homes, used masks and gloves should be disinfected using the same method and kept in a separate wrapper in a closed bin before being handed over to sanitary workers.

While waste from quarantined homes will be processed at bio-medical waste processing centres and incinerators, waste from other homes will be treated as domestic hazardous waste and incinerated by the GCC, an official release said.

Corpn has screened 86.74L homes in city

As per official data released on Saturday, GCC has screened 86.74 lakh households in the city as on Friday under its door-todoor fever survey. At least 2,488 people with symptoms have been identified of which 1,746 have been cured. The rest are under observation, and they will be followed up. “We have achieved 90% target penetration of households,” Prakash said.

Responding to a question, Prakash said the civic body had the required manpower to attend to those who were under home quarantine in containment zones and doordeliver essentials would be delivered to them. He added that all 407 Amma canteens had witnessed almost double the consumption of food. “Usually the daily sale is 5 lakh to 7 lakh. We are now selling food for around 12 lakh every day,” he said. There was adequate supply of groceries at these subsidised canteens with a buffer stock of 15-20 days, he said. Responding to a question about increase in prices of essentials, he said there wasn’t any major spike in the number of complaints received. “However, if such complaints are received, we shall forward it to the labour department or initiate action ourselves,” he said.