Nadia district administration on Friday revoked its decision for a weeklong comprehensive lockdown from August 8 and instead opted to impose shutdowns on August 13 and 14 in some specific areas.

The decision for the weeklong lockdown has been modified apparently after chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday spoke against such a long spell of shutdown.

She had advised the district administration not to announce a lockdown that extends beyond “two days in a row”.

Sources in the district administration said after the chief minister’s statement, several people, including politicians, had called up senior officials to modify the lockdown. The district administration eventually modified the order on Friday in line with what Mamata had wished.

However, justifying the climbdown, district magistrate Vibhu Goel said the initial order was modified following “several requests and appeals received from different quarters to relax the lockdown”.

The Nadia district administration had on Wednesday announced a weeklong comprehensive lockdown from August 8 to 14 in eight municipality towns and 25 gram panchayat areas to arrest the spread of Covid-19.

On Friday, the district recorded 53 fresh positive cases, taking the number of total patients to 1,147.

A senior official of the district administration said: “We had planned a strict weeklong lockdown since a section of the people in the district was blatantly violating safety norms. But we were compelled to change the decision since the weeklong lockdown did not go down well with Nabanna.”

Birbhum offices

The authorities of two municipalities — Rampurhat and Sainthia — have closed their offices for at least four days after an employee from each of the offices was diagnosed with Covid-19 on Thursday night.

Chairman of Rampurhat municipality Aswini Tiwari said though the office would remain closed, emergency services would continue.