The East Singhbhum district administration has decided to check each and every house in the district in a massive exercise to identify everybody with travel history, either overseas or domestic.

The district administration, with help of the 2011 census, has identified over 4,76,931 houses in the 11 blocks including the urban Jamshedpur-Jugsalai block. To reach each house, the administration has mobilised not only the over 1,700 sahiyas and anganwadi sevikas but also the 1,885 booth-level election officials, panchayat raj institutions and even local community leaders.

“We do not want to leave any scope in tracing out an individual who might have come from abroad or from another state or district to East Singhbhum and want to reach each of the houses in urban and rural areas of the district in a limited time span,” said East Singhbhum deputy commissioner (DC) Ravi Shankar Shukla. “We have decided to involve everyone entrusted with implementation of government schemes and activities in the exercise and want to complete it within a week.”

Training sessions for booth-level officers were held on Monday morning at different locations of the district.

“The objective of training them was to impart basic knowledge of Covid-19 and also preliminary symptoms and basic information to be sought from each household in the district and also from neighbours about any newcomers from other districts or states. We decided on BLOs (booth-level officers) as they have wide acceptability and are known to each of the electorates for distributing voter slips during the Assembly elections last year,” said additional district magistrate (ADM), law and order, N.K. Lal.

The district administration has also decided to take the help of persons who have been active in the various peace committees at the police station level and are known faces in their locality.

“These peace committees have acted as a bridge between administration and local populace during peaceful conduct of festivities for the last few years and we are also involving them in the house-to-house survey by giving them the tag of community leaders,” DC Shukla said. “We have held orientation (sessions) for them through the local urban bodies.”

According to the district administration’s plan, these teams of anganwadi sevikas, sahiyas, booth-level officers and community leaders will be coordinating with the surveillance teams formed in different blocks of the district.

“The members of house-to-house search operations would be sharing their information with respective surveillance teams formed for each block for easy tracing of houses having visitors from abroad or other states/districts,” ADM Lal said. “We have information of most of the persons from abroad but want to know about persons who have come into the district from other states or districts prior to the lockdown or even after the lockdown.”

As per the district Covid-19 surveillance unit’s data, till Sunday 12,847 persons were under home quarantine in East Singhbhum of whom 1,237 persons have come from abroad and 11,610 have come from other states. Around 800 persons are staying in state quarantine centres across the district.