Even if we are to accept that locking down a state for two days every week does help curb the spread of coronavirus, the way the West Bengal government is going about things must raise eyebrows. If it is known, for instance, that the state will lock itself down every Tuesday and Saturday, it is possible to plan work, travel and other essential tasks.

But with the state government having decided it will pick and announce the dates from time to time and without following any discernible pattern, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the effort seems directed more at causing inconvenience to a people already ravaged by disease, a natural calamity and severe fissures within the political class than at mitigating a public health crisis.

The pick and choose approach to epidemic control first manifested itself through the curious decision to bar incoming flights from select cities. As explained in these columns earlier, that convoluted scheme could easily be circumvented by the ingenious, or desperate, traveller. The latest decision, which encompasses a ban on all flights on lockdown days, will put travellers to great hardship as the fear of last-minute cancellations will force them to buy tickets late ~ and at higher cost ~ and throw reconnections into a tailspin. It must be admitted though that the spread of the epidemic has been a cause of concern.

With more than 50,000 cases, nearly 1,300 deaths and daily increases in infection, West Bengal faces a daunting task, especially as chronic gaps in its tattered public health infrastructure have been startlingly exposed. But there is little epidemiological explanation for the random selection of lockdown days at a stage in the disease’s cycle when the efficacy of lockdowns itself is open to question.

The decision seems to be of a piece with the whimsy that sometimes characterises governance in the state. It is high time state governments, cumulatively, agreed on certain ground rules for lockdowns for the multiplicity of regulations and restrictions across the country may even have caused greater harm to the economy and to the ordinary lives of citizens than the disease itself.

Production chains and distribution networks, for instance, can hardly be expected to cope effectively with such disruptions as may be caused when, for instance, a component made in one state is to be used in another and falls prey to uncoordinated and, worse, random lockdown schedules.

It is time for the Union Government, principally the Prime Minister, to take matters in hand, rein states including those ruled by his own party in, arrive at a uniform and coherent set of rules and find a way out of the morass that we have landed ourselves in. In the absence of such an initiative, federalism will run amok.