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Culture & Living
Vogue Warriors: Meet the IAS officer who spearheaded the containment of COVID-19 in Bhilwara, Rajasthan
Tina Dabi’s containment strategy of a possible coronavirus hotspot became one of India’s early successes in the fight against the pandemic
On March 20, a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced his plans for the janata curfew, the city of Bhilwara in Rajasthan recorded its first positive case of COVID-19: a senior doctor from an established private hospital. “We were suddenly facing a situation where an entire hospital and all its patients could be possible positive cases, and through them, the whole city and district,” says Tina Dabi, the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer who has been Bhilwara’s sub-divisional magistrate since October 2018 and is currently spearheading its containment strategy. “We were sitting on a ticking time bomb.”
Contain, trace and treat
For Dabi, who studied political science from Delhi's Lady Shri Ram College and was inducted into the IAS in 2016 (she topped the 2015 Union Public Service Commission exam), the only way to break the chain was “strict and total containment”.
Two days later, the city was sealed, as were its district borders, and the area around the infected private hospital was turned into a no-mobility zone. Three days before PM Modi’s nationwide lockdown kicked in, Bhilwara, a national textile hub, became the first spot in the country to lock itself down. “The entire contact list of the hospital was traced and screened. Those found with influenza-like symptoms were quarantined,” says Dabi. “After that, the entire population of Bhilwara district was surveyed and screened so that suspected cases could be quarantined and treated.”
To make this a reality, Dabi and her team began to clock in 18-20 hour workdays in their quest to minimise the spread of the coronavirus. “It was like we were in a war zone, but we could not see the enemy. All we could do was be careful and take necessary precautions to safeguard the general population.”
As elsewhere in the country, Bhilwara too had to contend with the drawbacks of imposing a snap lockdown: pulling off door-to-door delivery of rations, addressing the issue of migrant workers, keeping essential services running, and ensuring that those in need of emergency medical care had access to it—all while social distancing. “Managing a public health crisis on a war footing has been the lesson of a lifetime, and it’s exhausting,” she says.
The balancing act
At present, a typical workday for Dabi and her team has no sense of time and space: “We work 24x7, eat, sleep, breathe at the office or in the field; we haven’t had a single day off or weekend till now.” But it’s all been worth it. Bhilwara was pegged to become “India’s first coronavirus hotspot” and the next Italy, but the quick action by Dabi and her team stopped COVID-19 in its tracks. “Things are now under control; we have only one active case (which is under treatment) and have been categorised in the orange zone.”
Dabi’s swift response in Bhilwara has been widely praised, both nationally and internationally. “It always makes you feel good when your hard work is appreciated. It brings me immense pleasure that our achievements have been appreciated and that we have been blessed to remain on the right trajectory since,” she says.
And though Dabi thinks that the Bhilwara model can be applied to our metros, she concedes that certain measures need to be tweaked to suit individual locations. But despite that, her advice to the rest of the country is simple: “Strict containment measures (curfew and lockdown), targeted screening and sampling, all while ensuring that essential services keep running.”
Vogue Warriors shines the spotlight on the women at the medical frontlines and essential services—doctors, nurses, scientists, innovators—alongside behind-the-scene heroes working tirelessly to help us through the ongoing pandemic.
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