All places of worship to remain closed till June 30

Kanpur: All religious places of the Kanpur Nagar district will remain closed till June 30. A decision to this effect was unanimously taken at a meeting chaired by the divisional commissioner Sudhir M Bobde held here on Wednesday following spike in number of corona cases and new hotspots that had emerged in the city in the last 24 hours.
The city has recorded 21 fresh cases in the last twenty four hours and three infected persons have died in this period. The health authorities had found as many as 16 cases in the city on June 8 and 18 cases on June 9 respectively.
Under unlock 1.0 guideline, religious places could be opened from June 8 last but the leaders of all religions at a meeting held with the district administration officials on June 7 had expressed their inability to control and manage the crowd of devotees. They had sought time from the district administration to discuss the issue within their community.
It was decided to convene a meeting on June 10 to discuss and decide the issue therefore as per schedule, all religious leaders attended the meeting on Wednesday afternoon.
During the meeting, all religious leaders were of the view that after opening of the places of worship they could somehow would control the large number of devotees inside religious places of worship but it would be difficult for them to control the situation outside.
“Controlling entry of five persons at a time inside a religious place is not an easy affair as everybody will try to go inside at the earliest and thus will break social distancing rules“, said mahant of Anandeshwar temple.
Managing sanitization of devotees too would be a difficult job as who would supervise that their hands have been sanitized properly or not. In that case, any infected person may infect many persons. To avoid such a type of situation, the religious leaders said that they were not in favour of opening of religious places so soon, said an official.
District magistrate Brahmadeo Ram Tiwari then announced in the meeting that all religious places would remain closed till June 30.