Why aren’t Covid-19 frontline workers being compensated? How many have been compensated so far? The High Court wanted to know this information from the state. The state presented the data at the hearing in Calcutta High Court on Thursday. Acting Chief Justice of the High Court Rajesh Bindal expressed doubts about the number of first-line fighters who have lost their lives while performing their duties. Also, he wanted to know as to how many of them have already been compensated by the government. He did not want to believe the figures given by the state. The judge on Thursday, directed the state to make this information public.
A case related to Covid-19 related casualties was heard on Thursday. Earlier in the hearing, the question was raised that despite promises, the front line workers were not being compensated by the state government even if they were affected or killed by the virus. The judge then ordered the government to submit the information. On the same day, Advocate General Kishore Dutt, on behalf of the state, said that 180 applications have been submitted to the state seeking compensation of Rs 10 lakh among the frontline workers who lost their lives because of the pandemic. The state has paid compensation to the 101 families. On the other hand, the number of front line workers affected by covid is 30,693. Out of these, 9,190 people have been paid Rs 1 lakh as compensation.
The Acting Chief Justice’s Division Bench expressed some surprise at the information provided by the state. Justice Rajesh Bindal said, “Only 160 government workers have died and as much as 30,000 government workers have been affected. This information is not initially credible.”
In addition, the state has been asked that it should be able to inoculate the maximum number of vaccines per day. The Division Bench of the Acting Chief Justice also wanted to know whether there is adequate infrastructure for vaccination at the government level.
The number of “excess deaths” registered by the Civil Registration System (CRS) in West Bengal ever since the COVID-19 pandemic hit (from April 2020 to May 2021), was an estimated 1,20,227, which is 11.1 times the official reported figure of 10,787 deaths for the same period.
The online data for the 18 districts showed that 3,68,477 and 4,10,503 deaths were registered in West Bengal in the CRS, which were close to 94.4% and 90% of the deaths reported by the Annual Report on Vital Statistics based on CRS 2019 for these years.
Excess deaths were calculated as the difference between the registered deaths in the pandemic period and the average number of deaths registered in 2018 and 2019 for the same months. The CRS annual report for 2019 notes that death registration in the State improved from an estimated 91.8% in 2018 to 100% in 2019. An estimated 91.7% of all deaths were also registered within 21 days of the occurrence according to the same report, which is relatively high compared to other States.