20% in home quarantine in Punjab breached geo-fencing

CHANDIGARH: About 20% people with Covid-19 symptoms put under geo-fencing by the authorities to restrict their movement have breached it in Punjab. As many as 5,490 persons have been geo-fenced in the state till now, of whom 1,078 breached the fencing.
The Punjab government is using technology to track the whereabouts and movement of people put under home quarantine.All the people who are advised isolation or home quarantine are geo-fenced and their movement is tracked through a mobile application and phone location. The state government has been authorized by the central government to track the movement of people through their mobile phones under relevant laws.
Sharing the details, Punjab's governance reforms secretary Ravi Bhagat said that Cova mobile application is installed in the smart phones of everyone put under home quarantine. The tracking teams fetch the movement data from the application. In case people under home quarantine don’t have a smart phone, their movement is tracked via their phones with the help of tower locations. “The movement is tracked in real time. The moment a person breaches the fencing, a report is shared with chief medical officer and administrative officer of the concerned area, so that the breacher is immediately moved inside the house where they are supposed to be and put inside the geo-fenced area,” said Bhagat.
As per instructions from the health department, geo-fencing is considered breached when a person crosses the 1,000 metre radius. States like Kerala and Tamil Nadu are using the same technology to track movement of people under home quarantine.
Patiala, the home district of Punjab chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh, has recorded the maximum number of 445 breaches, followed by Hoshiarpur where 164 people moved out of geo-fenced area. Muktsar recorded 106 breaches while in Ropar, Mohali (the district with highest number of positive cases in the state) and Ludhiana 81, 54, 46 breaches were reported, respectively.
With Cova mobile application — a multi-utility application developed by the department of government reforms and public grievances in consultation with the health department — turning out to be an effective tool, the government, earlier this month, issued directions to make all people download it.
Invoking relevant sections of The Epidemics Act 1987 and National Disaster Management Act, 2005, principal secretary (health) Anurag Agarwal passed an order asking Google and Apple to mandatorily ensure that all their customers in Punjab download the Cova app. The government also made it compulsory for all social media networks\applications\messengers — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp and YouTube — and all the telecom service providers — BSNL, Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone-Idea — to regularly push the notifications and show advertisements in the form of banner\text to their users in Punjab to download the app, which is available in English, Hindi and Punjabi.