For mouth-watering 'golgappas' and north Indian street food, people throng Bengali Market in Tansen Marg of Lutyen's Delhi, barely a kilometre from Connaught Place and two from Parliament House.
But on Wednesday, this tiny market founded in 1930 was cordoned off and sealed as police patrolled the tony locality, after a COVID-19 surveillance team found 35 workers staying in a small room in one of the landmark pastry shops of the capital, throwing all advise on social distancing and caution to the wind. Two among them were "febrile" or showing symptoms of fever
Now, the residents in the locality are confined to their homes and not allowed to move out, as the owner of the pastry shop that sees huge footfall on a normal day is claimed to have turned a blind eye towards his workers.
All started with a surveillance team of New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) along with police carried out intensive house to house survey in Bengali Market after three persons living in the locality tested positive for COVID-19 with an aim to find people with 'influenza like illness/fever'.
During the exercise, 325 houses and two markets in Bengali Market, which was founded by a businessman Bengali Mal Lohia, were surveyed and around 2,000 people screened. It was during this exercise that they found two workers who were very unwell living in "unhygienic" conditions in 'Bengali Pastry Shop'.
To the utter shock of the team, they found another 35 people staying in the same shop "within the small space", attracting the "potential threat" of the spread of Covid-19 and the owner of the shop not taking any steps to provide facilities for his workers.
"The act on the part of the owner of M/s Bengali Pastry Shop...is not only highly irresponsible and contrary to the various provisions of Disaster Management Act 2005 read with Epidemic Disease Act 1897 and regulations made thereunder besides against the penal provision of Indian Penal Code," wrote New Delhi District Magistrate Tanvi Garg in her order.
In a statement, Bengali Pastry Shop said it has been "implicated by the media for giving shelter to 35 staff members" belonging to three different establishments. "Widespread defamation has naturally followed.
"The people who were living with us were taking shelter in our establishment as they could not go back to their respective home-towns due to the immediate lockdown carried out in the country," it said on Twitter, claiming media reports were "incorrect".
Soon after the incident came to light, Garg ordered that the locality be sanitised the entire area under the containment plan to prevent "further spread" of COVID-19 in the adjoining areas of Bengali Market, whose links to the state of West Bengal is only in its name.
On her orders, police immediately cordoned off the area to "prevent the movement of persons out of the vicinity of Bengali Market" and initiated action against the owner of the pastry shop. While the two who were unwell were shifted to a hospital for COVID-19 testing, the 35 others were shifted to a shelter home.
Civil and police authorities have now been instructed "not to allow" residents in the area to move out of their houses and to ensure door to door supply of essential commodities in the locality in coordination with market associations or by any appropriate mechanism.
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