After 33,000 cases, Maharashtra to hire 17,000 health staff, seeks help from Kerala

MUMBAI: Two months and 33,000 Covid-19 cases later, Maharashtra, which is still sleep-walking in the midst of the pandemic, is beginning to realise that there are 17,000 vacancies in the health department which need to be filled up, 600 of which are in the class-I and Class-II category, who are responsible for overseeing the functioning of the health department.

Perhaps hoping for a quick-fix solution, Maharashtra health minister Rajesh Tope has reached out to Kerala health minister KK Shailaja to find solutions to stem Maharashtra’s rising infection rate.

Tope has now announced that the state will fill up the 17,000 vacancies, but the government will take another two months to complete the recruitment.


“They should have started hiring more personnel right at the beginning. There are regular budgetary provisions for this. Hiring staff now will not make much of a difference as they will be freshers...,” said former bureaucrat Mahesh Zagade to ET.

Who’s in charge?
To make matters worse, the government departments are clueless as to who is in charge.

A fortnight ago, the civic administration in Pune gave shopkeepers specified days and timings when they could open their shops. But the very same day, the Pune police began taking action against shopkeepers and gave them a completely new set of timings and days to open, causing confusion and anger.

In another instance, Maharashtra’s rural MLAs told ET that the state should take the local administration in their jurisdictions into confidence while allowing inter-district travel as infections were increasing in their villages from people coming from cities.

Lack of co-ordination
Even basic things such as putting out details of the nodal officers’ numbers so that people who need assistance in different districts can get in touch with them, has gone awry.

Sanjay Gurav, a social activist from Mumbai, was stranded with his family in their native village of Harchandi in Mahabaleshwar for more than a week. Gurav wanted to come back to the city as his daughter was ill, but none of the nodal officers’ numbers given by the state government worked.