The boss of cities: Will the pandemic yield space to urban bodies?

Cities are setting the rules that now carry life and death implications for their residents. Whether it is Nagpur, Hyderabad or Delhi, most of those rules are sought to be set by municipal authorities

Tukaram Mundhe, the municipal commissioner of Nagpur in Maharashtra, sits in a war room every day with his medical officials to track measures to block the spread of the contagion in the city. Nagpur has opted for institutional quarantine for anyone who tests positive. That means greater monitoring.

“We did it in March itself when we found it impossible to keep people indoors. Placing them in our care has broken the chain of transmission, though the Indian Council of Medical Research guidelines only asked for home quarantine,” says Mundhe. The city has managed to keep case fatalities below the national